


The Good Son

by Greekhoop



Category: Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: American South, Chaptered, Country Music, Crossover, Dysfunctional Family, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-01
Updated: 2011-12-01
Packaged: 2017-10-26 18:17:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 35,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greekhoop/pseuds/Greekhoop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Troubling family secrets come to light when Louis makes a fledgling, Quinn Blackwood investigates a geneological inroad, and Lestat tries to keep order in New Orleans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> First-person POV and fussy stylistic choices are in the first chapter only; after that the prose becomes a lot more straightforward. If you don't like that kind of thing, you may decide you want to wait it out.

I’ll tell you a story I’ve never told anyone before.

In the spring of 1910, I left Nouvelle Orleans and went north. Armand was gone and Lestat was gone and Claudia was gone, and so there was no one left to whom I had to make excuses or explain myself. I simply woke one evening and realized I was tired of the South, and so I packed a single valise and boarded a train with the intention of riding all night.

Despite my long life, I had actually seen very little of the country of my birth, though it was growing bigger by the day. I had never met a Northerner until I returned from my time in Europe. By then, the Yankee carpetbaggers had settled in quite comfortably and the cities were expanding and most of the remaining wild places had been torn up by the logging and mining trusts.

I could still remember returning from Paris with Armand, the things I had told him about my home. Almost none of them turned out to be true. Much had changed in the decades I was away, and all the old myths had been stripped and flayed and vivisected, their deformities and hollowness put on display for all the world.

Sometimes I think it was, at least in part, my own disappointment that drove Armand from me. The space between the past and the present could not be bridged, and so it became the distance between he and I.

I don’t know if he would agree with my assessment, but in the end he went away. And then, one day, I stepped off a train and found myself in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It was a fairly large city, even in those days, and it had the solemnity of great age, something I had not experienced since leaving Europe. I checked into a hotel – I would not be using it to sleep, but it was a comforting ritual, and it gave me somewhere to store my valise. After that, I went down towards the college to take in the Colonial architecture.

***

_I closed up my leather bag and I used Shreve’s brush on my hat so that I would not have to use my own, then I set the hat on top of my head and pulled it down firmly. Now I had nothing left that I wanted to do and only one thing left which I had to do._

_When I took out my watch I saw that it was only a little past eleven and I had time still. I was in no hurry to do the thing I had to do, but I thought that it would be best to get it over with quickly so I would not have to think about it anymore. I picked up my letters from the table and I went out and shut the door. The letters were already posted, so I only had to drop them in the box. My legs were moving as if of their own accord. I was not telling them to move at all, but they went on, knowing the way already, and so I followed._

_I was thinking very little now, which was the way I would have had it all along. As my legs bore me out to the corner so that I could catch a streetcar, I was hardly thinking at all. I was only noticing such things as how warm the night was and how some people were alone and looked very lost._

_He was on the sidewalk near the library when I saw him, that thin man with the pale face. I knew at once that he was not from here, and that made me a little angry. How dare you come here now? I wanted to call out to him. You have come too late._

***

I cannot tell you why I followed the boy. The campus was mostly empty at that time of night, and he passed me alone, walking fast, with his head down and thrust forward as if he were charging a target.

His pulse was racing, and I could smell the hot musk of his blood. I could smell, too, the lingering scent of honeysuckle, and this puzzled me for I had not seen any bushes on the campus and besides the season was all wrong for honeysuckle. It took me some time to realize that it was not any true honeysuckle I smelled, but rather the memory of a perfect honeysuckle from some time past, which the boy’s thoughts exuded like perfume.

I followed him out to the road where he boarded a streetcar. I climbed on behind him and stood in the back. He sat at the window but as near as I could tell, he did not once look out. His blood never stopped raging in his veins, and its wild and unpredictable throb filled me with hunger. I thought of how his blood would jet into my mouth when I pierced his throat, the warm arterial spray of it against the back of my palate, and I felt as if I had been hollowed of everything but my need for him.

How long I had been empty I could not say. I think that everyone who ever left me took a piece of me with them, but they were only small parts, fragments, so I did not notice the of them lack at first. Slowly, gradually, over the course of many years, I had become a shell. Only now, at that moment, had I realized how much damage had been done.

My eyes were still trained on the boy. He got off the streetcar at the post office, and I was close behind.

***

_I put the letters in the box and I listened to the very soft sound the made as they hit the bottom. Now, I felt better because I knew that I could not change my mind or else I would risk breaking a promise. I thought of the shame of them finding those letters, and I not having done what I had set out to do. I thought of how embarrassed everyone would be._

_Then I left the post office and I walked down towards the boathouse, the same way I had walked earlier. Soon I was close to the river, and I could hear the sound of it chopping at me through the trees. It was a very quiet night, especially in this neighborhood._

_When I got to the bridge and I stepped out onto it, my footfalls were the loudest things in the darkness._

***

I stopped at the end of the bridge. He went out to the very center, as if he already knew by heart the exact number of steps it would take. He stood at the rail and let the minutes go by, and he was in no hurry and I had no prior appointments, so I only watched him there. He was as a figure outside of and impervious to the passage of time.

After a quarter of an hour, he reached behind one of the bridge supports and retrieved a wrapped bundle. Inside of it were two weighs such as a butcher might have used to balance his scales.

He put the weights in his coat pockets, one on each side, and I knew then that he meant to do what he meant to do, and that there was nothing on earth or in Heaven above that could stop him. He climbed over the railing, and I saw his dear white knuckles gripping it fast. His fingers were long and delicate, like splinters of bone.

Over the water, he leaned out, and I thought that he meant to let himself fall. But he knew and then I knew that he could not do it. The smell of his fear was like an animal smell. He could neither go forward, nor return. If I had left him alone, he might have slipped; in time, his grip might have weakened. But I knew that he would not let go of his own accord.

In an instant, I was at his side. I felt clearly the tensing of every muscle, each pump of blood that carried me out onto the bridge, but the time it actually took me to traverse it could have been measured in fractions of a blink.

***

_I thought: a ghost, but that was not right. Though it was not entirely wrong, either._

_A hand touched my wrist, and it seemed very cold in the hot night. It felt nice, so I didn’t flinch or try to pull away, though I was surprised. I didn’t expect anyone else to be there, because even I was not there. I was far, far away._

_Curious, I looked up at him. He had a handsome face, but he was pale. His eyes were an astounding green. I have a poor sense for beauty, but he seemed beautiful to me._

_I knew I ought to recognize him, so I searched through my memories, as far back as I could go. But it was no good; I couldn’t remember a thing._

_He spoke to me in the voice of a gentleman, with just a hint of Creole patois. He said, “Is it that you wish to die and you cannot? Or that you wish to live and you know you mustn’t?”_

_His words hardly seemed like words at all. They were just crude, primordial sounds._

***

He stared at me. His face had a clear and intelligent look, but in his eyes was the incomprehension of a man addressed in a language he does not speak.

“Tell me, sir,” he said quietly. “Are you Southern born?”

That startled me, but I replied. “Yes. I’m from Nouvelle Orleans.”

“Oh,” he murmured. “I’ve never been there.”

He watched me, his expression perfectly composed. Only his eyes seemed bright and feverish, awash behind his round spectacles as if the twin glasses were mirrors upon a different face.

He went on. “I am not here because I want to be, or because I must. I am here on account of a woman.”

This he said simply, and with no hesitation. His voice was steady, even musical, but all the while his eyes went on rolling in their sockets like the eyes of a terrified beast. I felt an awful pity for him, for when you stripped away the Puritan solemnity and the Modernist melancholy, he was rather a handsome boy.

He was here, though, far from home, and he had as little to return to as I did.

I took him by the waist and lifted him over the railing so that his body was up against mine. He seemed not to notice at all. I could hear the knocking of his heart, and I could see his memories in brief glimpses, like whiffs of perfume. His thoughts were hazy. They moved aimlessly and without direction, as if through an impenetrable fog. The fog was the smell of honeysuckle that descended over all his past and all his future.

I caught a glimpse of the branch of a creek, and I saw a woman who was perhaps nothing more than a girl. The fog hid her face from me, as she took her dress in her hands and she lifted it above her knees, and she lifted it higher still…

A fierce and implacable hunger gripped me. It came up in a wave and blotted out everything else, save for the beating of his heart. I crushed him against me so hard that his ribs creaked. The breath went out of him in a strangled gasp.

My teeth were at his neck.

***

_I saw him descend, and it seemed to take a lifetime for him to traverse the six inches to my throat, as if he were no longer moving at all, or I were falling away in perfect symmetry, making a gulf between us that he could never traverse. I wanted to take his shoulders in my hands and draw him close, or wrap my arms around his neck and feel myself bend beneath him. I wanted to whisper in his ear things that I think he would like: Look, look. Here is my body, given for you. But I did nothing except quiver beneath him, for I had never done any such thing as that before._

_His teeth broke the skin, and then I felt his lips on me. They were cool and papery, but not unpleasant. They were as when you are very small and you stand beneath the big willow and feel its branches drape around your shoulders and up against your neck._

_There was no pain at all, just an exquisite, inescapable pressure, as if a wire had been strung from my heart to his lips and every pull from his mouth made me dance for him._

***

He felt light and brittle in my arms, like bones without marrow, like a suit of clothes with no body to fill it. The dry rustle of his heartbeat came up to me, and I listened to it chanting down down down into darkness. A few stray thoughts whirled in the air, the last fragments of a dying mind: O honeysuckle, o sweetness. O Jerusalem, let me never remember thee.

I bit my lip and let a drop of blood fall on the marks my teeth had made so that they closed and all that remained on his throat was a faint stain, a bruise that might have suggested and of a thousand small violences. I held him clear of the railing and I let him go. It seemed he made no sound at all when he fell, as if air and water both parted to receive him.

The weights in his pockets pulled him quickly down and out of sight, and I thought that if I tried I might feel some secret grief for him, as if he bore with him beneath the black water some part of my own past, my own birth and death. Yet when I tried to conjure up some reminiscence, some symbol that I might burn upon my heart for both of us, I saw only the faces of Armand and Lestat. The faces I wanted least to remember, lurking in the darkness behind my closed eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

The sun had not been down for long, and Lestat was still lounging in his pajamas when he felt the presence pass through the psychic tripwires he had erected around the city of New Orleans. He had intruders into his territory a lot these days, and he knew that it was partially his own fault. He had become permissive lately, lax in the enforcement of his rules.

Most of the ones who made the pilgrimage were practically newborns. Here it was, not even twenty years since Lestat had been playing sold out shows and topping the Best Seller List, and already there was a contingent of vampires who doubted he even existed. Whether he was a myth, a conspiracy, or a practical joke they had not yet decided, but they had begun to slip quietly and without fanfare into his city. They only stayed a day or two, and by the time Lestat had roused himself sufficiently to hunt them, they were already gone.

Then there were those, too, who believed all too fervently and yet came anyway. They, invariably, were young as well, and still intoxicated by their newfound immortality. They had not yet developed the calluses of a long life, and they were convinced that, should Lestat only lay eyes on them, he would make an exception, take them to his bosom, love them. It wasn’t that they weren’t beautiful, or charming, and some even told fascinating tales that were very nearly true. But it was these very things that Lestat had once valued above all else that made him intolerably weary now.

Lestat lay abed and tracked the movements of the trespasser with his mind. Almost at once, he knew that this one was not like the others. He came on with blithe indifference, passing through the tripwires without flinching or faltering, though surely he must have felt them. He was none too young, just coming out the other side of his first century, the tail end of his awkward adolescence. By this, Lestat could not abide.

Languidly, he got up, flung open the door of his walk-in closet and sifted through the phalanxes of quilted hangers. So many things were old, out of fashion. Kept only out of habit and out of his unwillingness to throw anything away save when he was throwing away everything with the intention of starting afresh.

He settled at last, almost at random, on a Dolce and Gabbana three quarter cashmere coat with a detachable black shearling collar, slim pants with a hint of a checkerboard pattern, and Ralph Lauren buckled leather ankle boots with low heels that gave a little boost to his height. A single sweep from his fingers made his hair fall into place.

As he left the security of his soundproof boudoir, Lestat was almost instantly aware of the thrumming of a guitar echoing down the grand staircase from the upstairs hall. Quinn was singing low, rough, under his breath. He had no real knack or love for it, so he sang just to keep time and hold his place. Maybe he sang because he was bored. His fingers moved so fast now, each bending and crooking separate of the others. When Lestat had first met him, Quinn had been a lazy strummer of open chords, but now he executed the complex finger picking of Mississippi John Hurt and the rapid down-strokes of Jimmie Rogers with laconic ease. He exhausted all possible variations and then, in a fit of tedium, flung off the guitar, restrung it upside down, and started over again with his left hand.

He was about an eighth of a step flat, Lestat noticed with some measure of distaste. Amongst the many benefits of their kind’s heightened senses was perfect pitch, which Lestat had never hesitated to make good use of. But Quinn had always believed that close enough was good enough, and that sloppiness was the same thing as character.

Lestat knew it wasn’t his place to say anything, and in truth he dreaded the sullen and contemptuous look that Quinn would fix on him if he did. But he did hate to see that gorgeous sunburst Gibson Hummingbird that he had bought him – and it hadn’t come cheap – treated so carelessly.

Still, Quinn sang to himself, his voice a papery whisper, flat to match the flatness of the guitar. Lestat moved on soft feet, thinking that, if he were lucky, he might be able to sneak out unnoticed.

_Smoke hills of Tennessee_   
_Down the road to Georgia_   
_You’d better get some sleep_   
_I’ll be closer to you tomorrow_

Lestat slipped his wallet and his key into the pocket of his coat. All at once, the song broke off, but there seemed to be no delay at all between the final choked note and Quinn’s appearance at the head of the stairs. He was leaning against the railing on the landing, as if he had been standing there for a long time.

“So, you’re finally going to do something about our vermin infestation.” He sucked his fangs, as if trying to dislodge something from the inside of his mouth. It was a habit that Lestat found almost intolerable.

“You can come if you like,” Lestat said. He deliberately didn’t turn to face him; he disliked the feeling of being looked down on from upon high.

Quinn knocked the heel of one of his worn shit-kicker boots against the baluster. “It’s Lent.”

“You’ve given up going outside for Lent? I must say, Tarquin, it doesn’t seem that it would be much of a sacrifice for you.”

He sucked his fangs again, making a shrill whistling noise. “Get rid of him, _dad_. I put up with your groupies and star-fuckers coming around here, but I don’t like this one.”

Lestat made a great show of checking his phone for messages. There were none, of course; he had so few callers these days. At last, he had no recourse but to glance up at Quinn. His elbows were propped on the banister, and he was draped lazily over it. His jaw bristled insouciantly with the three-days beard growth he’d be unfortunate enough to have on the night he was turned. His stained jeans were slung low across his hips, and the legs were shoved down into the tops of his cowboy boots, making for an ugly puckered look around his calves.

He was wearing the artificially faded and distressed Vampire Lestat band tee-shirt that he’d bought at Urban Outfitters. Lestat hated that shirt, and Quinn wore it often, even consenting to have it washed occasionally so that he could retain the privilege.

Almost immediately Lestat regretted looking up. Quinn’s eyes were hard and blank. There was nothing to be read in them.

“What?” he spat.

“Nothing.” Lestat sighed. “It does please me to gaze upon your beauty sometimes. That’s all.”

“Whatever. Just take care of that guy. He’s not like the others.”

“I would like to know what makes you say that.”

“I’d like to know what makes you think I can’t feel it. It’s so clear. It’s like pain.”

Absently, Lestat flipped once more through the empty inbox on his phone. The touch screen reacted sluggishly to his icy fingers.

“What day is today?” Quinn asked abruptly.

“The ninth.”

“No, I mean what day of the week?”

“Tuesday.”

“New music day…” Quinn said vaguely, sucking his fangs.

“If you want anything, you’ll have to come out with me,” Lestat said, impressing even himself with his casualness.

“Forget it.” Quinn straightened up, stepping back from the railing. “I’ll just order it from online.”

He withdrew into the vast shadows of the unlit landing. Before Lestat was even out the door, the fast picking and the slow, dull singing had resumed. It chased him out into the night.

***

Once he had left the residential district behind and entered the French Quarter, Lestat experienced a full ten merciful minutes during which he didn’t have to think about anything. Even in the middle of the week the cacophony on Bourbon Street was so great as to drown out any attempts at reason or sense. Charivari was the word that came immediately to mind, and Lestat found himself suddenly grieved that the once fashionable term had fallen into obscurity.

The intruder was not far. It was clear to Lestat that he had come to New Orleans with a purpose in mind, but it was still his first time in the city, which could reduce practically anyone to a tourist. He, like so many others, had sought out the tall French-Colonial townhouses that he knew from movies and books, and he cleaved himself to them as if they were a familiar face in a crowd of strangers.

Lestat followed him for a long time without letting himself be seen or letting the intruder come into sight. The stranger’s presence was like a small, white flame that gave off intense light but almost no warmth at all. He wended his way through the narrow alleys between the bars and hotels, pausing sometimes to listen to a fragment of music or a scrap of conversation, but he did not enter a single one. His hunger was a sharp and constant ache lodged in his belly, but he was not deliberately putting off feeding. He simply seemed accustomed to skipping the occasional meal.

On Prytania Street, he made a sharp turn and bounded over the fence into Lafayette Cemetery. Lestat followed him, and he realized as soon as he was inside that he was being observed. Slowly, he turned. The young vampire was watching him from beneath the shadow of the wall with an incurious expression on his face. He had made no attempt to conceal himself, and he stood unmoving, with his hands fisted deep into the pockets of his rumpled blazer.

“You’re trespassing,” Lestat said, after he had given the stranger a moment in which to speak first.

“I know. The cemetery is only open in the mornings.”

Lestat frowned. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“I know what you meant, sir,” the stranger said acidly. He seemed reluctant to step forward so that Lestat could see him better, but in the end he did.

He slouched inside his threadbare suit. His cuffs were spattered with mud and his shirt was misbuttoned. He wore a pair of rimless old-fashioned eyeglasses, which Lestat supposed he did not need, and they kept the light from penetrating the irises of his eyes. His black hair was curly and glossy; his skin was china white and his lips were as red as a girl’s. There was nothing wrong with the way he looked, but nothing that immediately struck Lestat as beautiful, either.

“You should go,” he said. “Clearly you didn’t hear about my rules. New Orleans belongs to me.”

The stranger said nothing. He slipped one of his hands from the pocket of his coat, and Lestat saw that his fingers were long and delicate and his nails exquisitely kept. He had only an instant to admire them before the stranger grabbed hold of his own shirt collar and wrenched it open. One of the lost buttons pinged off a gravestone in the darkness.

Lestat was shocked by the brazenness of it, annoyed that the stranger had managed to surprise him; in spite of all that, his eyes were drawn to the exposed column of his throat. He sucked in a breath, and managed, through some effort, to fit a smirk of elevated amusement to his lips.

“I think you’re missing the point,” he said. “I made the rules in the first place so I wouldn’t get pestered for favors all the time.”

“Do it,” the stranger said. “I’m not leaving until you do.”

Lestat’s expression soured. “You really want to die that badly? There must be a hundred better ways—“

“I’m choosing this one. You’ve already come this far. My reasons shouldn’t matter to you.” He said it quickly, all in one breath, and Lestat knew that he had rehearsed it beforehand. He didn’t seem like the type of person who was particularly good at talking. He was still holding his collar out away from his throat, but he seemed about to let his hand fall. Before he could, Lestat was upon him, pressing his small, cold fingers with his own. He caught the smell of honeysuckle. Curious, for he had not noticed a bush.

The stranger made no sound as Lestat descended upon him. His body was wound tight, as if he were trying very hard not to pull away, and even when Lestat’s teeth pierced the skin of his throat he did not relax into the embrace. He seemed to take no pleasure in the communion, as if he had never enjoyed it before, had never even known that it was a thing to be savored.

The blood that flowed into the Lestat’s mouth tasted curdled - somehow dirty, somehow unclean - and Lestat concentrated his efforts so as to be finished quickly. The next thirsty pull of his throat dislodged a clump of memories, and Lestat’s mind was flooded with the stranger’s thoughts.

He heard water rushing in the darkness, rushing somewhere out of sight, at the bottom of a deep chasm. The smell of honeysuckle was overpowering, nauseating. The water closed over his head, and the few lights that had glittered high above vanished. And then a face floated in the darkness, and Lestat saw it for only a moment but he could never have mistook it for another.

He flung the stranger aside. There was a sickening crunch as his body struck the wall.

“You…” Lestat gasped, wiping his bloody mouth. “Who are you?”

The stranger was picking himself up off the grass, keeping one hand pressed to the gash in his throat. He was trembling, and he had become so pale that the lattice of his veins was visible through his skin.

“My name is Quentin Compson,” he said softly. And then, after a moment, he added, “The third.”

Lestat studied him carefully. “He never mentioned you. And yet you know him. I mean… don’t you?”

“Are you speaking of Louis?”

“Who else?” Lestat said.

Quentin was quiet for a long time. His eyes did not move from Lestat’s face. He still held one hand pressed to his neck, though the blood had stopped a long time ago. He reached back with the other, steadying himself against the cemetery wall.

“He’s kept secrets…”

“Not from me,” Lestat said firmly.

“From everyone.”

“That’s impossible. He swore he’d never make another of our kind.” Lestat drew himself up, as if his pride had been personally insulted by the insinuation. “He’s not a liar.”

“He wasn’t lying when he said that.”

“Then why…?”

“Because he thought that he would turn me, and then he would leave me to die. And then we would both have what we wanted. But I regret that I was unable to honor my half of that bargain.”

Lestat looked the boy over critically, trying to figure out what Louis had ever seen in his scrawny bookishness, his black eyes, his small features, his patient Southern drawl, his indeterminate age. He realized with a growing horror that he had never really understood Louis’ preferences; never really known what he had longed for.

He swallowed dryly. The aftertaste of Quentin’s blood was bitter in his mouth. “I can’t kill you now. Not knowing this. You’re practically family.”

Quentin nodded slowly and said nothing. His pride would not allow him to be relieved, but he didn’t seem too upset by Lestat’s refusal either.

“Where are you going to go?” Lestat asked.

He shrugged.

“Do you have anywhere to go?”

“I had this place.”

Lestat felt a surge of maternal tenderness towards this boy. Practically family, yes. In a way. And Louis did not even seem to know he lived. He was so sentimental, Lestat thought. He would want to be told. It would weigh upon him otherwise.

In an instant, he was decided. “Why don’t you come home with me?”

Quentin looked at him with dull incomprehension.

“To my estate. I think you’ll like it. I don’t mind, for I can see that you have a trustworthy face. Besides, I’ve always had good luck with strays.”

“I see.”

“I’m going to have to tell Louis, of course. I feel it is my duty.”

“Yes, one must not go against one’s sense of duty.”

Though Quentin had not accepted his offer, Lestat smiled at him broadly and slipped an arm around his narrow stooping shoulders. “Let’s get something to eat first. You look half-starved. Just like a little lost ghost.”

“I must decline, sir,” Quentin said. “I am regrettably possessed of a delicate constitution. I must be very selective when I take my meals.”

“Yes, you mean you only kill the Evil-Doers.” Lestat laughed. “I can’t really take credit for starting that trend, but I admit I certainly popularized it.”

Quentin turned his face up to Lestat’s. His opaque black eyes beneath the glass of his spectacles reminded Lestat of a pair of Stone Age obsidian tools inside a museum display.

“It is something like that,” Quentin said. “Indeed it is.”


	3. Chapter 3

On the shelf, a bronze metronome clicked back and forth in supremely disciplined regiments of 368 beats per minute. That was fast enough that only a seasoned musician or a vampire could keep up. To untrained mortal ears, it wouldn’t have sounded like much more than someone fucking around with drum rolls, but it brought to Quinn Blackwood’s mind thoughts of tucked and tidy 50s Jazz and grimy 90s raves.

Neither was particularly what he in the mood for, but he let the metronome swing on. It was a good piece of hardware. It didn’t slow down or start skipping beats over time. There was something cheerful about its constant tick-tocking, something friendly. There were times when Quinn let it chatter on for days at a time, until, exasperated, Lestat stormed up the stairs and tried to throw it out the window and into the river.

You hate anything that can out-talk you, Quinn had said the last time. And Lestat had retreated as if he had been kicked. Though later, he'd overheard him on the phone, grumbling into the sympathetic ear of Stirling Oliver that Quinn was ‘touched’ and ‘heading down a worrisome path’.

A little bit of impromptu theater staged for Quinn’s benefit, no doubt. He didn’t pay it much mind, though he wasn’t particularly pleased with Lestat’s newfound penchant for down-home folksy turns of phrase. Quinn still had his photogenic good looks, he still got invited to fly out to Austin for the weekend for gallery openings, and he was still of some use to Lestat. Once a week, they went out for dinner, and Quinn propped up the conversation like he was reciting a monologue. He talked music, film, art, celebrities; and Lestat glutted himself on names to drop and fashionable opinions to hold.

To his credit, he pulled it off like no one Quinn had ever seen before. Sometimes they’d attend an after party together and while Quinn staked out the men’s room looking for cokeheads to siphon a few pints from, Lestat held court with cute cynical little things who were even younger than he had been when he was turned. To hear him talk, you’d think he gave a damn about the things he was saying, or even knew who half the people he mentioned were. Though, Quinn supposed, he came from a different time. He probably got good at that kind of thing frequenting the salons of slutty Duchesses, or whatever they did back in those days.

Quinn put his back to the metronome and crossed the room, his steps falling unconsciously into rhythm. He paused before the rack of instruments: two guitars that he’d brought with him from Blackwood Farm, a third that gaudy overpriced thing Lestat had bought him. Banjo, mandolin, cello, upright bass, pedal steel. Quinn looked them over for a long time but made no move to take one up. He turned back, walking straight towards the metronome now, and he stopped to inspect the contents of his bookcase.

He realized he was pacing and made himself sit down.

Lestat was taking his sweet time out there in the city. Knowing him, Quinn thought, he was probably staring at some perfect rose or new public art installation with a moony smile on his face and a tear in his eye. Loafing around Arcadia when there was real work to be done.

It wasn’t as if Quinn asked him for much. This house, these private rooms, the parties, the vacations, the useless extravagant gifts, all of them had been Lestat’s idea. As soon as he had found out Quinn picked around on guitar, he’d rushed out and bought the most expensive instrument he could find. It had a tone as sweet as honey, Quinn had to admit, but at $4000 it ought to have summoned a big-titted genie or some suchlike every time he played _Sweet Home Alabama_ on it.

Since moving in with Lestat, Quinn was up to his damned neck in new clothes, designer labels, eelskin boots, Louis Quinze furniture, Japanese screens, guaranteed one of a kind leather goods, highbrow pastiches of street art, and nothing less than three new home theater systems meant to replace his old record player. More kept coming in, and all Quinn wanted was one thing less, one thing less.

By hook or by crook, come Hell or high water, that vampire down in the city proper had to go.

It wasn’t as if Quinn didn’t feel some measure of pity for Lestat’s fans, for he, too, had bought into the myths about this city, and he had descended from his lonesome high tower longing for art and for culture, and he had found only a heap of colorful beads discarded in a gutter. Though the music was loud and lovely, and the food so good that even a man like he had been when he was alive - a man who loathed eating - had to sample it all. And the old wounds and prejudices almost never emerged in polite company. And wasn’t the black man emancipated now? And free to make a livable wage cleaning up garbage on the Tulane campus, and free to die at forty-five of heart failure, if he so chose?

Quinn did not believe he had been lied to in his younger years, but he knew now that his education, as thorough and Classical as it had been, was shot through with holes.

He had turned twenty-four in the Fall and it felt as if he had spent the majority of the time since berating himself for his stupidity at age twenty-three, and almost the entirety of his twenty-third year hating himself for how naive he had been at twenty-two. He saw the life he had ahead of him as a series of concentric rings, each a little smaller than the last, as more and more of his being became subsumed by fallacy and regret.

Not much to look forward to, but, hell, he was the one who’d wanted the damn Dark Gift. In the end, perhaps even his awkward and ungainly fits of repentance would turn out to be just another mistake.

In the meantime, there was the matter of the vampire. Quinn had known from the moment he had felt him set foot in New Orleans that he was no hopeless romantic, no tourist who had come to gape at the old buildings and the inscriptions on the tombs in real true French. He had come with a purpose in mind, and he was tenacious in his pursuit of it. Quinn could not guess what that purpose might be, and it rattled him all the more. He could feel only the trajectory of the stranger’s relentless, cold-minded persistence, but not the cause of it.

Lestat would take care of it, Quinn told himself. If there was one thing he was good for, it was coming through in a pinch.

Feeling suddenly wrung-out, Quinn reached over and opened the drawer in the little table next to the bed. He groped around the interior blindly until he found a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Through experimentation, he had learned that he could still smoke, so long as he was careful about it. He had to trap the smoke in his mouth. If any of it got down in his lungs, he’d start coughing like he was trying to bring up an organ or two. He didn’t get a nicotine buzz anymore, but it was nice to have little rituals, things he could do with his hands. Lestat absolutely hated it of course, and that was just an added bonus.

Deftly, Quinn shook a Parliament out of the box and brought it to his lips. Once upon a time, his poison-hungry body had demanded nothing less than two packs of Camel Wides every day, but now it didn’t much matter which brand he smoked. He liked to rotate through them, switching out whenever he got bored. Sometimes he pretended that the advertisements were all true, and he could encompass the whole of his personality in a single quickly-vanishing column of ash.

He lit up, drew in, exhaled. Watched the smoke float lazily towards the ceiling. The metronome was still going full-tilt, but Quinn swung one of his booted feet in more laconic rhythm. He thought,

_A long time ago_   
_No shoes on my feet_   
_I walked ten miles of train track_   
_To hear Hank Williams sing_

After a moment, he placed the lyrics. Billy Joe Shaver, of course. Not one of his mother’s favorites, thank god. For her, country music began and ended in Nashville, Tennessee, and all those Texas roughnecks were goddamn imposters and philistines. Once, Quinn had made the mistake of bringing up Bakersfield in her presence, and he’d gotten treated to the whole frigid, superior Scarlet O’Hara act.

They sound like a bunch of colored boys, she’d sniffed disdainfully, and you’d better believe that was the end of that conversation.

_His body was warm_  
 _But his spirit was free_

Quinn caught the melody on the upswing, and he let it lift him. The cigarette drooped, forgotten, between his fingers but he kept his hold on it this time. Lestat would pitch a fit if Quinn burned another hole in his Egyptian cotton sheets. He could hear footsteps out on the porch, light whispering vampire steps. Lestat coming home, coming home where he belonged…

_And he sang every song_  
 _Looking right straight at me_

The front door opened, and he heard Lestat’s boots in the foyer. But there was another sound, too. One so soft Quinn hadn’t even caught it at first. Another pair of footfalls, echoing Lestat’s like a whispered voice. They shouldn’t have been there. Whoever belonged to those steps didn’t have any business in this house.

Quinn’s body jerked violently, and he sat bolt upright in bed. In his breast, he felt a little black seed of fear beginning to take root.

Holding his breath, he crept out into the hall. A wisp of smoke followed in his wake, and he knew that Lestat would smell it, would make him pay for it later. No sense trying to keep his movements up here a secret; Lestat had the eyes of a hawk, the hearing of a bat. Goddamn telepathy on top of it. What good was it to ask him for privacy when he’d just hit you with that big-eyed, melancholy look of his and say he only did it out of love?

Quinn kept back in the shadows on the landing and watched them come inside. Lestat hung his camelhair coat – collar turned up like some old movie detective – on the rack and miraculously he didn’t look up and catch Quinn spying. He was talking a mile a minute, running his mouth about any old thing that popped into his mind. A little dark shadow walked a few steps behind him, but it was hard to tell if Lestat’s running monologue was for him, or if he was even listening.

Rode hard and put away wet, Quinn thought, not without some degree of pleasure. Lestat’s new friend was skinny as a rail, scrunched down inside his suit with his hands shoved in the pockets. He had the look of a vulture, a carrion eater, and Quinn was briefly ashamed that he’d ever been frightened of him.

But then he realized he was still afraid.

He watched with growing distaste as Lestat set a hand on the stranger’s shoulder, taking the opportunity to tug at a lock of curling hair.

“Go ahead and make yourself at home,” he said. “I’ll put in a call to Louis.”

That got Quinn’s attention. Lestat almost never mentioned that name. When he couldn’t avoid talking about him, it was always ‘an old friend of mine’ or ‘someone I used to know’, and never just ‘Louis, the guy with the book, who I obviously kind of hate for making me look ridiculous but I still think the sun practically shines out of his perfect rosy asshole’.

But some things you didn’t need a goddamn Mind Gift, or whatever they’d all agreed to call it, to figure out.

Lestat headed off to the study, presumably so he could talk in private. The weird stranger watched him go with a flat, unreadable expression. He didn’t turn when Quinn descended the stairs, didn’t even seem to know he was there until Quinn spoke.

“Hey.”

The stranger turned, and the way he transformed that simple movement into a loopy half-asleep pirouette made Quinn feel ill at ease.

“Good evening. Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”

“Quinn. Blackwood.”

“My name is Quentin Compson.”

They regarded each other in silence, a few interminable awkward moments in which Quinn had plenty of time to reflect on Quentin’s sunken cheeks and tracing paper skin. Christ, he looked bad. Wasted and sickly, as if he were being preyed upon from within.

At last, Quentin removed his spectacles with a delicate white hand. He wiped them on his shirt tail, and then tucked them in to the breast pocket of his coat.

“Can you see without those things?” Quinn asked.

“I can see everything,” Quentin replied. “But, all the same, I prefer them.”

“That’s cool,” Quinn said. “I think you look better without them, though. Some people, you can just tell they usually wear glasses, even when they don’t have them on. They have this look like something is missing from their face. Not you, though.”

“No. Nothing is missing.”

Quinn sucked in a deep breath. The room seemed unseasonably chilly. “Are you from around here, Quentin?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Your accent. It’s not Louisiana, that’s for sure. It’s more like hillcountry speak. I’d guess Georgia.”

“You would be incorrect, sir. I was born in Mississippi.”

“Well, hell. We’re practically neighbors, then. Small world, isn’t it?”

“Miniscule.”

Quinn paused, wondering if Quentin was making fun of him. There didn’t seem to be anything malicious in his dry tone, though. He was probably just the type of person who was bad at first impressions.

“Do you know Louis?” he asked.

“We were briefly acquainted,” Quentin replied. “He saved my life.”

“Lestat and he—“ Here, Quinn fell silent for a long time. “It’s hard to describe. Sometimes I feel like the second wife in one of those Gothic romances, you know? I used to read a lot of those when I was a kid. I thought there’d be tits in them or something, I guess. But there’s always a mysterious first wife who no one ever talks about directly, but in some ways it’s like they’re always talking about her. And then along comes this poor dumb girl who thinks she’s snagging herself a harmless rich old guy, but all she’s doing is getting saddled with all his baggage.”

“I am well acquainted with that feeling.”

Quinn let out a shuddering breath. He believed Quentin. There was a desperate need in him to believe, and he did it almost on instinct.

“What’s your business with Lestat? Is it okay if I ask that?”

“My business with him is concluded. But now he seems to have business with me.”

“I see.” He watched Quentin’s face closely. “Lestat’s a good man. I mean, he’s got his good qualities. He can be really intense sometimes, though. I’m not trying to be his hype man or anything. I’m sure you can tell what kind of a person he is.”

“He wears his heart on his sleeve for all to see,” Quentin said quietly. “But you do not, if I may be so bold. What kind of person are you, Quinn?”

“Me? I...”

Quinn had just begun to stammer out a response when Lestat returned from the other room. He was slightly flushed, but other than that there was no indication that he had just held an honest to god conversation with Saint Louis Point du Lac, tamer of unicorns and shitter of rainbows.

Glad for the distraction, Quinn snapped his mouth shut and sealed the words deep within.

“Tarquin,” he said. “So good of you to join us.”

Was that a hint of animosity in his voice? A hint of reproach? A hint of disappointment at this pair of not-Louises cluttering up his foyer? Perhaps, Quinn thought, he was only imagining things.

“I didn’t know we’d be having company,” Quinn muttered, and he glanced away as Lestat’s eyes swung slowly, like a pendulum, from his face, to Quentin’s, and then back again.

“Well, I declare,” he said at last. “What a remarkable likeness. Quentin, I didn’t notice it when you had your glasses on, but you and my Tarquin could practically be brothers.”

Quinn gave a start. Lestat was full of casual surprises, but that was the last thing he had expected – or wanted – to hear from him. He fixed Quentin with a blazing look, as if he could burn away the similarities between them like fingerprints in an acid bath. Quentin had a high, smooth brow lifted from his Scotch ancestry, a small upturned nose lifted directly from a cameo portrait of a pretty girl, and curled lips lifted from god knew where. Quinn didn’t see the resemblance, and he came away wishing he had not looked so hard for it.

“Is Louis coming here?” he said, eyes averted, not wanting to see Lestat’s face.

“He may have some business to attend to,” Lestat replied. “However, it isn’t polite to eavesdrop, Tarquin.”

Quinn bit his lip, started to say something, gave it up as too much effort. He felt Quentin’s soft, solicitous gaze stroking him.

“Perhaps, sir, you will permit me to impose upon your hospitality. Would you join me for a meal?”

When Quinn risked a glance at him, Quentin was watching him with a curious, benevolent smile, the existence of which he seemed to not even be aware of.

“Sure,” Quinn said, his voice a rasp. “Sure. You look like about ten miles of bad road. You must be starved.”

“The notion had occurred to me.”

Quinn turned to Lestat, drew himself up and threw his shoulders back. He was a full head taller in his cowboy boots, but there was no question who the pup in this relationship was.

“Southern generosity beckons, dad,” he said, making a great effort to sound casual. “I’m not bringing this good old boy back until he’s put on at least ten pounds.”

Without waiting for a reply from Lestat – he seemed unlikely to get one – he swept Quentin out the door and into the hot wet waiting night. As they descended from the porch, Quinn made as if to put his arm around his shoulders, but at the last second, he lost his nerve.


	4. Chapter 4

They walked down along the water, side by side, though it was pretty clear from the start that Quentin had no intention of following anyone anywhere. He had something specific he was set on, and one look at his face cautioned Quinn against trying to turn him from it.

He didn’t seem in any hurry to start up a conversation either, and Quinn figured that was his issue. As for himself, he got out from under Lestat’s watchful eye in like-minded company so infrequently that he found he was opening up without meaning to at all. As if his thoughts had been piling up for a long time, needing not even so much as a by-your-leave to come tumbling out.

“This your first time in New Orleans, Quentin?”

Quentin blinked as if coming out of a stupor, but there was nothing sleepy or distracted in his voice. “I must admit that it is. I had always heard such things about it. It is a city with character, so people said. However, I did not have the opportunity until now. I have been abroad for some time.”

“That’s cool,” Quinn said. “Lestat’s travelled a bunch too, and sometimes he’ll get to talking about it. Stuff was different back in those days, though. He always ends up just telling a bunch of stories about like how he was in the Swiss Alps and some princess from St. Petersburg was staying in the neighboring chateau and what a witticism she came out with at this one soiree…”

“I see,” said Quentin. And, to his credit, he really seemed to.

Quinn glanced over at him, taking in his bent posture, the way he thrust his head forward when he walked, as if he were eternally advancing upon some unseen enemy. Briefly, he wondered where Quentin was taking them, but he did not ask.

“About Lestat,” Quinn said. “I don’t want to freak you out or anything, but he doesn’t like vampires coming into his city. He’s said before that he’ll kill any who come into his territory.”

“I am acquainted with his thoughts on the matter.”

“But you came anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Was it because of Louis?”

“Only indirectly.”

Quinn shrugged. “It’s not really my place to say. I crashed the gate uninvited too. I was having bad troubles. Family troubles. I couldn’t think of anyone else I could ask for help.”

“Family can be a mighty burden,” Quentin said softly.

“Tell me about it. Mine’s still alive, some of them at any rate. We don’t talk much. I told them a rich older man was saying he was in love with me, and I was going to move in with him and he was going to pay my bills. I thought I knew how they’d take it, but I was wrong. They took it way worse than that. They’re pretty… you know.”

“Protective?”

“I was going to say conservative, but you may be on to something there. I reckon they’d do just about anything to protect themselves from fags and foreigners and birth control and learning about Evolution.”

Quentin stopped in his tracks. Slowly, he turned and the dreaminess passed out of his expression and he was suddenly looking at Quinn straight-on, without blinking or flinching. The corners of his mouth came up into a smile, and his upper lip peeled back from his teeth, displaying his fangs.

Unsettled, Quinn glanced away.

“Sorry. Not sure what came over me just now. Let’s not take it as an excuse to talk politics, okay? Nothing good ever came from two men arguing about the things neither of them can change…”

“Shh.” Quentin reached up, touching the side of Quinn’s face, and Quinn swallowed the rest of what he’d wanted to say in a strangled gasp. Quentin stroked his jaw, fingertips rasping against his stubble, until he had made his way around to Quinn’s mouth. He made a lazy half-circle with his fingertip, tracing the shape of Quinn’s lower lip.

“Jesus,” Quinn whispered. “Your hands are freezing.”

Quentin’s smile did not falter. It, too, seemed frozen in place. “I feel faint.”

“Shit, let me get you something to eat. Don’t know why I even let you talk me in to wandering this far. Not like there aren’t sufficient enough assholes everywhere…”

“No,” Quentin said sharply. When he withdrew his hand, Quinn felt his shoulders slump. He had not known he’d been holding himself so tense.

“There’s still time,” Quentin went on. He turned away, swaying a little, as if he were heavier up top than on the bottom. “It does no good to rush these things.”

Quinn kept quiet. In truth, short of when he was prowling through a bar trying to find someone drunk enough to give him a decent buzz but not so drunk he’d forget his own name and start running his mouth about the Dixie Chicks or something, he didn’t make much of a to-do about hunting. Most nights, he just grabbed a crackhead looking for a fix from down by the harbor. Though he knew full well that it was nothing short of heresy for a man from the bayou, Quinn wasn’t much of a foodie. At sixteen, he’d tried to go veg. He’d failed spectacularly, of course. Hummus and quinoa weren’t exactly staples at Blackwood Farm, where they still slaughtered their own hogs and ate every bit, right down to the squeal. And the grease. Especially the grease.

At any rate, the diet had been short-lived but the damage had been permanent. Quinn never regained his cast-iron constitution. Just the smell of gumbo in the pot had been enough to give him heartburn; reading the restaurant reviews in the Times-Picayune had made him nauseous on more than one occasion. Things hadn’t gotten much better with the change, but at least now he could plead conscientious objector status when Lestat pestered him about why he wasn’t enjoying his meal of career criminal.

“Tell me more about your family, Quinn,” Quentin said, each word like a touch from a soothing hand.

Quinn submitted to it, allowing all his ruffled feathers to be smoothed back into place. “I don’t suppose you want to hear any more poor little rich boy stories from me. But my family… they’re not an old one. My great-great grandpa came down from Milwaukee after the Civil War had cooled. He had a pretty good head for business. Can’t imagine the locals cared for him much, but they cared for his money just fine. He set up in shipping. Did all right, too.”

Quentin had not stopped walking, had not even slowed, but Quinn felt that he was listening intently. It made him feel bold, and he kept talking, drawing out the details, painting him a picture. Telling it like a real story, the kind they were so famous for down here.

“He picked New Orleans because of the shipping, though more than likely he could have made a profit anywhere he laid down an investment. Not like there was a lot of spare capital and entrepreneurial spirit back then. The real reason my folks decided to settle here was so they wouldn’t have to convert. My grandpa hated Protestants like it was going out of style. It’s all there in his letters. My great aunt kept them all in this big cedar trunk in the library. Treated them like they were the goddamn Wisdom of Confucius. But I’ve read those letters, and they’re fifty percent bitching about snake-handling white trash Baptists, and the other fifty percent whining about lazy ungrateful Negroes. So, that’s my family. What about yours?”

“Hush,” Quentin cooed, and Quinn felt the word slide down his spine like a sliver of ice. He remembered the touch of Quentin’s cold hand, and how his fingertip had tapered just as smartly as a blade.

He had taken them away from the tourist-sanctioned parts of town, but these neighborhoods weren’t any sleepier than their upscale neighbors. It was closing in on four in the morning and the basement clubs were still hopping with the beats of Juvenile and Soulja Slim. These were the places the locals came to drink and save themselves the privilege of paying $12 for a beer.

Quinn glanced over. Quentin had his head cocked to the side as if listening, his face back as if scenting the air. He went off at a brisk trot, and Quinn followed close behind, though he was beginning to think it was more to keep him out of trouble than anything.

Outside the Magnolia Bar and Grill, Quentin seemed to have found what he was after. A guy and a girl had crept around to the alley side of the building, and, in the shadow of the wall, they were engaged in letting nature take its course. As a vampire, Quinn didn’t exactly get horny anymore, but when he saw people going at it like that he felt curious stirrings, like he was a dog watching his master from beside the bed.

He glanced over at Quentin in time to see him winding up tight to spring.

“Shit, what the fuck?” was all Quinn had time for. By the time it was out, Quentin was already in flight.

A single stride carried him across the street. He snatched up the girl around the middle, knocking the breath out of her, and dragged her deeper into the alley. The boy he just swept aside, like he was nothing of any consequence.

Quinn bounded after him, caught the fella around the waist and felt a scream already vibrating up his insides to his mouth. He drove his fangs in and cut it short.

He drank the boy down quick, then dropped him behind a dumpster and went to rustle up Quentin. He found one of the girl’s black leather pumps abandoned on its side, and then, a few yards further down, he found the rest of her.

Quentin was still bent over the body, his face down close to the girl’s, and his back arched so that, in his dusty suit, he looked for all the word like a dull black spider hunkered over its prey. He didn’t get up when Quinn came close, didn’t even move to untangle himself from the girl’s limbs. One of his knees was bent up between her legs, pushing her little skirt before it, giving Quinn a glimpse of her panties, wadded clumsily over to one side.

One of Quentin’s hands was cupped behind her neck, lifting her limp head a little, and the other was moving thoughtfully, tenderly, through her long, dishwater blond hair, combing the rumpled parts out straight.

Quinn’s stomach clenched. All that blood he’d just put away suddenly felt ten pounds heavier and a hell of a lot less appetizing. Just his luck, he thought, a whole world of vampires out there, and he was stuck with the one who fancied himself a killer from an episode of one of those crime scene shows.

“Quentin,” he said sharply, hoping the sound of his name would snap him out of it.

Breathing a sigh, Quentin lifted his head from the girl’s corpse. For a few seconds, he just stared straight ahead, into the dark at the far end of the alley. Then, at last, he began to straighten up.

The first thing Quinn noticed was that he stood taller now. His question-mark posture had realigned itself. Quentin turned, slow and deliberate, all of his off-kilter gracelessness gone. He put his face up so the light fell on it, and, before Quinn’s eyes, his hollow cheeks fleshed themselves out and the dark shadows beneath his eyes scrubbed themselves away. His hair lifted away from his face and rearranged itself automatically, until it was brushed smartly back from Quentin’s brow, rippled like the wing of a crow in flight. Jet black with underpinnings of bruise blue.

For as long as he could remember, and even after he’d topped 6 foot and 200 pounds, people had called Quinn pretty. Understandably, he was sensitive about the word, and he rarely trotted it out to apply to women, much less other guys. But even he had to admit that Quentin was a damned pretty boy. With the color back in his face, he had the inscrutable glow of a young girl at her first Communion.

“Oh…” Quinn said, and then immediately wished that he had not. Beneath Quentin’s steady gaze, he felt a blush creeping over his cheeks.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “You took off after that gal like you knew her…”

Quentin tilted his head curiously to one side. “Didn’t you ever have a sister?”

“Well.” For a moment, it was all Quinn could muster. At last, he shook his head. “Not really. Just a brother. Sort of.”

“That’s too bad, Quinn. That is truly a shame.”

“Is it now?”

Quentin reached into his pocket and retrieved a soiled handkerchief, which he dabbed delicately at the corners of his mouth. This seemed to bring his frayed cuffs to his attention for the first time, and with a dandyish bob of his head, he looked himself over.

“Heavens. I could use a fresh suit of clothes.”


	5. Chapter 5

Before returning home, they paid a visit to Lestat’s haberdasher, a dapper middle-aged black man, remarkable for his dual talents of being able to craft three-piece suits out of crushed velvet and not appearing the least annoyed when his eccentric clients woke him in the middle of the night.

Quentin glided around the showroom, touching the racks of shirts, his spine poker straight and his head balanced up top it as if it were mounted on a pike. Meanwhile, Quinn apologized and muttered unconvincing excuses about the airline having lost his luggage and almost caught himself wishing that Lestat were here to handle the business of keeping their stories straight.

At last, he managed to corral Quentin in one of the fitting rooms, stuff him into some Armani with all the delicacy and sense of ceremony of shoving a clove of garlic up the ass of a Christmas goose, and, after charging everything to Lestat’s account, herd him back out onto the street.

“You seem anxious,” Quentin purred. In his new clothes, he looked even stiffer than before. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s getting late, that’s all. Don’t you keep track of when the sun’s going to rise?”

“Of course I do, but we have some time yet.” He lifted his head, making a great show of looking towards the east. The sky was probably beginning to brighten by now, but here, under the dome of city lights, it was impossible to tell.

“How did you learn to fear the sun?” Quentin asked abruptly.

Quinn frowned. “I don’t fear it. I mean, not really. But I just know not to go out in it. It was like the first thing my maker told me…”

“When I became this that I am, there was no one to tell me,” Quentin said. “I had lost my watch. I could not say the hour for certain. But I was there on the bank of the River Charles and I was soaking wet and my life was running out from every crease and crack. And I was overwhelmed with the feeling that something terrible was coming for me.”

“Where the hell was Louis?”

“Gone, I should say. Long gone. I remember I plunged my hand into the wet earth, for I wanted something to hold on to. I felt that the stars were revolving above me at a great rate. But imagine my surprise, Quinn, when my arm sunk into the mud clear to the elbow. And then I was digging, digging, digging down. I did not think about why I did it, but it seemed that I knew I must. As if my body had acquired some ancient instinctual memory, bourne along by the transfusion of blood. I made myself a little grave, and it was very filthy, and very damp, but I was very grateful for it. By the time I climbed down into it, a little water had already seeped in, but I didn’t feel cold. Then I pulled the earth down onto myself, and I slept such a profound sleep, Quinn. Such a deep sleep, without a single dream. I thought that I’d finally gotten around to dying properly.”

“I can’t believe that Louis just up and left you like that…”

“You seem very eager to accuse Louis. I assure you, it was nothing save my own moral impotence and cowardice that was to blame for my unfortunate position then.”

“He had responsibilities towards you. He can’t just go around making vampires and then dumping them so he can keep his reputation intact.”

“I can see that you don’t care for him much,” Quentin said. “That’s a shame.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Quinn replied tersely. “Goddamn Louis, with his manners and his money and his fucking sugar plantation. He doesn’t even have the decency to be ashamed of what he was. He’s a relic, and the world already has enough of his kind in it.”

“I had suspected it might be something like that.”

Quinn felt himself broken down beneath Quentin’s dark, sympathetic eyes. He turned away, but he still knew they were there, boring two unblinking holes into him.

“It’s not like he can go back and change anything,” Quinn said at last, very softly. “Hell, I don’t even know him. All I have to go on is that damn book. But it feels like there’s a shadow hanging over me, over everything I do and everything I say. Because the past won’t just go lie down and be dead like it ought to…”

“You will meet him soon.”

“Yeah, I know. And I’m not going to have the balls to say any of this to his face. That’s why I’m taking it out on you. I’m sorry.”

“There is no call for you to apologize.” Not a sound, not a whisper, indicated that Quentin had stepped closer just then. Quinn did not even know that he had moved at all, until he felt the touch of a small, soft, papery hand on his own.

He flinched. Quentin stroked him as if he were a nervous horse. It sent a shiver down Quinn’s spine, one that became a full-blown tremor when Quentin swayed in close to him and whispered, “You are more family to me than he ever was.”

***

It came as no real surprise that Lestat immediately took an interest in Quentin’s newfound good looks. He had, Quinn suspected, always been willing to allow Louis a certain measure of Colonial simplicity and eccentricity that he would have openly sneered at in anyone else. All the same, it probably came as a great relief to him that he wasn’t going to have to acknowledge any homely step-children.

Three was a crowd, though, and Quinn had barely set foot inside the house before Lestat was already brushing him aside. He took Quentin’s arm, drawing him near, ruining in an instant all that pulse-fluttering closeness it had taken Quinn the whole night to cultivate. He had been gone a long time, Lestat was saying. They’d barely had any opportunity to get acquainted.

Quinn was left standing in the foyer alone, and he might have laughed just to have something to do with himself, if he hadn’t seen this whole thing play out before. Because Lestat hadn’t been alone the night he had come down to meet Quinn for the first time. There’d been that redheaded gal with the strange name with him. The one who he’d cast off so he could fuss over Quinn’s problems; the one who, in the end, had thought it best to go up in a pillar of flame.

It wasn’t as if Lestat had driven her to it or anything. Even Quinn, who prided himself on never losing sight of the way shit attracted shit attracted more shit, had not been able to draw any connection between those two events save that they were both small and selfish and gratuitous. Still, immortality might start to seem like an awful heavy burden to bear if you all of a sudden had to go about it alone.

He didn’t need anybody. Nobody needed him. Best to keep it that way.

Once he’d hung up his hoodie in the coat closet, and drug his feet for what he deemed a sufficiently long while, he wound his way into the parlor where Lestat was still fussing over Quentin.

“Of course,” he was purring, as he slipped a conniving arm around Quentin’s narrow, inviting shoulders. “There is a guestroom if you’d prefer. I just think it would be more convenient, not to mention more comfortable, if you slept in my room tonight.”

“I see,” Quentin said. “That is most thoughtful of you, sir.”

Quinn stood in the doorway, watching Lestat waltz through all the well-worn motions. It was enough to make you want to puke. He’d come in here thinking about the way Quentin had killed that girl in the alley, the way he’d been acting like a damned fool just before. All things Lestat would have wanted to know, that was for sure, and Quinn had made up his mind to tell him, if Lestat would just spare him a single glance.

But he never did. Quentin relented, and Lestat alighted him off towards the master bedroom in the back. He hadn’t even said goodnight, Quinn thought, with more despair in his heart than bitterness.

Only Quentin looked back at him before they turned the corner and went down the hall. His eyes sought out Quinn’s, held them. He touched his fingertips to his lips, as if he were going to blow a kiss, but then, in the end, he only let them fall.

Quinn stood there for a while after he was gone. It was almost dawn now, and the rising sun had sapped the strength right out of him. His eyelids felt heavy, but his limbs felt heavier, and all at once he could not imagine the effort it would take to drag them up the stairs. On an impulse, he flung shut the steel storm shutters on all the windows and threw himself down on the couch.

Though the house was sealed now against the daylight, he knew the exact moment the sun broke the horizon for it was the moment that all the life rushed out of him. Quinn lay with his head up on the couch cushion, swimming in a gray haze of drowsiness.

The air felt taut, pulled askew in the direction of the hallway, as if Quentin had, with just the movement of his hand to his lips, tilted the very axis of the world off center. Quinn could not turn away and put his back to it. He could do nothing but lay there and sink down into sleep, feeling for all the world like he was balanced on the edge of a great and treacherous precipice.

***

He slept heavily and woke up late, sore and tired and unrefreshed. Somewhere, a familiar song was playing, and Quinn lay still for a while, letting the music work its way through him, right down into his bones. By the time the first chorus was through, he felt like getting up.

Running a hand through his tangled hair in an attempt to make it lay straight, Quinn climbed the stairs to the second floor. The landing was dark, but down at the end of the hall, the door to his bedroom was open, and a little wedge of golden light spilled out. Quinn tried to muster some annoyance at having his personal space invaded without permission, though it suddenly seemed too much effort. If Lestat had done it, that would have been one thing, but he couldn’t feel Lestat’s presence anywhere in the house.

Besides, the record that was playing was a good one, and he was glad to hear it now.

Quinn went inside. The room was empty but the French door that opened up onto a sun porch was ajar. That was where he found Quentin, leaning against the balcony railing with his face to the hot night air, looking out over the acre or so of coiling virgin swampland that made up the backyard.

“Hey,” Quinn said.

“Good evening.”

“You sleep all right?”

“Like the very dead.”

“Lestat didn’t bother you or anything, did he?”

Quentin turned at last and looked at him. He was wearing his glasses again, the ones that seemed to partition his eyes off from the rest of his face. Though his lips were curved into a languid smile, the expression didn’t seem to hold true without his eyes to back it up.

“What’s wrong, Quinn? We were as innocent as two babes in the cradle.”

“I wasn’t implying—“

“Yes, I know. You have been nothing but gentlemanly to me.”

Quinn came over next to him, leaning up against the railing. With the music at his back and the aching silence of the swamp out in front of him, he felt suddenly strangely peaceful. He rested his elbows on the banister, contorting his long frame over it, and watched the wind thread through the leaves of the trees.

“Where is Lestat anyway?”

“In his room,” Quentin replied. “I believe he feels the need to make some last minute preparations.”

For what? Quinn almost said, but then he remembered. Louis was already on his way here. Couldn’t nothing change the events that were already in motion.

After a little while, the song ended and the next one cued up. It was one of those old-timey hillbilly laments, from the days back before the blues was the blues and country was country with a clean and clear divide between the two. All those old, timeless, ineloquent feelings of loneliness and hardship didn’t break along racial lines, or at least that was what Quinn wanted to believe.

He looked over at Quentin, wondering what he made of that high and lonesome voice creaking out _T.B. Blues_ to the sound of a slow-picked guitar and all the analogue hisses and pops of an old recording. He’d chosen it, but then again, he’d probably just put on the first record he laid hand to. Standing there like he was, perfectly composed and aloof, he seemed very far from any place that had ever needed a song like this one. He was thinking of Louis, probably. Louis, who would never dirty himself with the primacy of despair.

_When it rained down sorrow_   
_It rained all over me_   
_Cause my body rattles_   
_Like a train on that old SP_

All at once, Quinn felt the distance that had sprung up between him and Lestat. He felt his resentment of Louis, his separateness from his family. He felt his fear of Quentin, and his dislike of him for the way he had barged in to New Orleans and upset their neat little lives. It was all there in the song, though the song wasn’t really about anything except a man who was sick and how he had the blues.

While it played, Quinn went in and got his cigarettes out of the drawer. It would feel good to smoke one now, out in the open air.

But when he came back, Quentin was standing bolt upright at the rail, and he shivered all over like a dog listening to steps coming up the driveway. Quinn touched his shoulder, but before he got a chance to ask him what the problem was, a pair of headlights appeared on the highway behind the house. They hovered briefly, dipped out of sight, and then appeared again. Gliding steadily closer.

“That’s him,” Quentin said. A shudder ran through him, wracking his body so hard that Quinn felt it all the way up his arm. “He’s coming.”

“Well, we knew he was…” Quinn replied. It did not seem like the right thing to say, but he couldn’t do any better. “Might as well bite the bullet and get it over with, right?”

“No, Quinn. No.”

Quinn felt a surge of movement beneath the palm that cupped Quentin’s shoulder. It lifted upward and out, and by the time Quinn’s brain had made sense of it, Quentin was gone from the balcony. He had vaulted over the railing and down into the swamp below. Quinn leaned out and tried to catch sight of him, but he was only one shadow amongst many, carried rapidly away into the night.

“Where the hell are you going?” Quinn called.

But no reply came back.


	6. Chapter 6

Quinn shook out a cigarette and smoked it down anyway, though by now he had lost the taste for it and it had no savor. The headlights were near enough at the closest point in the road that he could make out the shape of the car behind them: a sensible compact, an anonymous rental car with no flashiness or personality. He was surprised, in spite of himself, for Lestat never travelled in anything except for the vehicle calculated to draw the most attention to himself.

The car went around a bend and out of sight. It did not occur to Quinn until then that Louis may have seen him, too. Or rather, the small dot of red light at the end of his cigarette, winking out a transmission of his presence.

He smoked without moving, almost without thinking at all, feeling comfortingly blank. Inside, the record came to the end of a side; the needle slipped out of the groove and the disk continued to revolve on the turntable, not quite silent.

Louis pulled up the long, winding driveway to the house. He must have been using GPS, Quinn thought. On the rare occasions that they had visitors way out here, they almost invariably had more trouble finding the place.

He got out of the car and walked up to the front door. Quinn heard all of this, for Louis was making no attempt at unnatural speed or stealth. He carried himself just like a living man, albeit one with a hell of a stick up his ass.

When he rang the doorbell, Quinn did not move. He stood out on the balcony, and wondered whether Lestat would let him stay up here or make him come down and make nice. And he wondered where Quentin was, because he was the only one who could make this, mercifully, be over.

Quinn’s phone buzzed with an incoming message.

 _Tarquin, get the door_ , Lestat had written. Only instead of ‘door’ it said ‘duck’, because Lestat didn’t know how to turn predictive texting off.

So, that was the way it was going to be.

Sighing, Quinn flicked his cigarette out into the yard. He paused long enough to change into a fresh shirt: brown and blue plaid, with pearl snaps. Halfway down the stairs, he remembered to pray. In spite of his best attempts at atheism, Quinn still believed in God, though often long stretches of time – whole weeks even – would go by when he forgot that he did.

Louis rang the bell again, but Quinn didn’t hurry. He got to the amen just as he reached the foyer, and then he pulled open the door and he and Louis were facing each other for the first time.

“Tarquin Blackwood?”

Quinn pulled himself up straight, wishing he could read more into those two words. But Louis had been so careful when he said them that they were only the flat and unadorned syllables of a name. One that, somehow, didn’t even seem familiar.

“Yeah. You must be Louis.”

“But of course.” His eyes moved once, flicking rapidly from the toes of Quinn’s battered cowboy boots to the ends of his unkempt hair. “Where’s Lestat?”

“You come to see Lestat?” Quinn said. “Or someone else?”

Louis’ expression did not change. It didn’t have to, though, because all the contempt he needed to express was written right there in the lines of his prim, aristocratic face.

“Spare me the moral platitudes, my sheltered little boy.”

Quinn felt his cheeks color, felt a tremor go through his limbs. He hated confrontation, and he didn’t know shit about how to win an argument. Twelve years of home school would do that to you. All the same, he was thinking of Quentin and his brittle bones and his solitude, and of all the years he had been left to fend for himself. You couldn’t blame him for being half-crazy, not after all that.

“It’s just as well,” Quinn said. His voice sounded creaky to his own ears, and he was sucking in each breath hard through his nose. “I don’t think he wants to see you. I don’t blame him. I think he’s probably right.”

Louis took it all without changing expression. “I see he already has you championing his precious Compson honor.”

“He doesn’t have me doing anything I don’t want to…” Quinn said, but he did not finish. It was at that moment that Lestat, presumably having grown bored of waiting for them in the parlor, wandered out to see what the delay was.

Louis’ gaze moved past Quinn and sought him out. It lingered there, taking Lestat in, and it was then that Quinn knew he had been utterly defeated.

Lestat came forward, clutching the hand Louis offered in both of his. “You came. You’re really here.”

“Yes, I’ve come.”

With a tip of his head, Lestat indicated Quinn. “You’ve met Tarquin?”

“We are acquainted.”

“Yeah…” Quinn said, but it did not seem that anyone heard. Lestat had lifted Louis’ hand to his mouth and kissed it, then he fit it neatly into the crook of his arm and escorted him inside. All of this Louis endured with an expression of weary tolerance but no real upset.

Quinn trailed after them, feeling ungainly, awkward, brutish. A peasant in the midst of nobility. For a long time, he had thought it was only Lestat who could make him feel that way, but he saw now that there was some innate class difference which he could never bridge. And as much as he tried to tell himself it was just as well and he would never want to be like that anyway, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was the hired help and they the masters of the house.

Lestat sat Louis down on the couch, making himself cozy beside him. He still kept his hand pressed delicately between both of his. Louis withdrew it coyly. Lestat took it back, and this time it was allowed to remain. Quinn watched all this from his station by the doorway and felt mighty sick.

“My beautiful one,” Lestat said, his voice low so that Louis had to lean close to hear. “My dark angel. Tarquin has been so eager to meet you. And I… Well, I won’t pretend not to know why you did it. But I missed you so, Louis. I did miss you terribly.”

“I have been of the mind to travel lately,” Louis said with a great carelessness. “It has been edifying. I feel I have improved myself immensely. And what of you? Have you been improving yourself as well?”

“Always and forever. But it’s no fun when you have to do it alone, is it?”

“You don’t seem quite alone at all,” Louis said. His eyes moved up to Quinn. They were carefully blanked of malice, just as his voice was carefully scrubbed of all jealousy and accusations.

Lestat smiled. “Tarquin is an absolute dear. He comforts me in my old age.”

“Give me a break,” Quinn said. “You’re not old, Lestat. You’ve got the heart and soul of an eight year old.”

“I am a sight older than you, Tarquin,” Lestat replied. “And I know a thing or two more, despite what you may believe. Louis, please forgive my boy. You know how they are in this age. They all have to be so wretchedly clever all the time.”

“It’s tiresome,” Louis said slowly. His green, unblinking cateyes still fixed on Quinn’s face.

Quinn’s throat clenched and he felt a hard knot take shape in the center of his chest. He almost didn’t believe it, didn’t want to think that he was still capable of shedding tears over stupid posturing bullshit like this. But the heat behind his eyes didn’t lie, nor did the red tint that had began to color his vision.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he spat, saying it quick so he could get it all out before his voice choked off. “You were being so nice to Quentin last night, Lestat. Real nice. But you don’t give a damn about him. He needs someone bad, and neither of you give a damn…”

Lestat’s lips twisted into a scowl. “Oh, yes. Quentin. Where is our little Southern Belle anyway?”

“Quentin Compson is more than capable of taking care of himself,” Louis said. “He has done admirably for this long, and he is surely capable of doing so for a little while longer. He displays the laudable traits of tact and discretion, which are common to well-bred boys but which certain young upstarts lack.”

There was no poison in the words, just the blatant disdain usually reserved for things you scraped off the sole of your shoe. Quinn opened his mouth, but the words dried up on his tongue. His pulse throbbing at his temples, he turned on his heels and stormed out of the room. When he went out the front door, he made sure to slam it hard, so they’d know they had their privacy at last.

Gulping back his tears, Quinn circled around the rear of the house, back into the overgrown swamp where he knew he couldn’t be seen from any of the windows. He passed through under the canopy of mangrove trees, slapping the low braches out of his way, feeling them snap back and hit him but not feeling the pain at all. Somewhere, a honeysuckle bush was in bloom, spitting its sick-sweet smell into the air, thick enough to gag him.

A curtain of blood descended over his eyes, momentarily blotting out his vision. Quinn blinked it away and he felt his tears make twin trails over his cheeks, splashing on his shirt and staining it.

And he thought, if there was any stupider, more useless reason than this to cry, he had yet to see it.

The strength went out of him, and Quinn slumped against one of the mangroves. He braced his arm on the smooth, barkless trunk and rested his forehead against it. His skin was pleasantly cool to the touch. He hadn’t cried in a long time, not since he had been old enough to realize it didn’t make anyone who had left you come back, but he was crying now. His shoulders shook silently, and his sobs came fast, one upon the next, though they came without any noise at all. When he kept his eyes open everything was rimmed in bloody red, so he screwed them shut tight.

“Quinn…”

He heard his name spoken so softly that for a moment he thought it was his imagination, or worse. The last thing he needed right now was another spirit latching onto him in supernatural co-dependency. Blinking a few times, rapidly, he turned around and peered into the darkness.

“Quinn.”

His name again, this time with corporeal substance behind it. A moment later, the shadows between two trees shimmered, and surrendered Quentin’s skinny upright shape.

“What has happened, Quinn?” he whispered.

Quinn shivered, feeling for all the world like he had been caught in the midst of some bad boyish mischief. “Louis is… Louis…”

He reached up to scrub at his tears, but before he could Quentin was at his side, pressing Quinn’s hand between his own. “Don’t let Louis trouble you. I shall set everything right.”

“Don’t…” Quinn’s gaze slipped downward. “I don’t want you to see him.”

“Whyever not?”

“I’m afraid he’s going to hurt you. Like, he might say something and hurt you…”

“Shh.” Quentin kissed his cheek, and Quinn felt a bloody tear burst beneath the brush of his lips. When Quentin leaned back, his mouth was stained red.

“I have no fear of such a thing.”

Quentin’s tongue flicked out, lapping the blood from his lips, and he kissed Quinn’s face again, pressing up on his toes to reach him better. He quivered all over with hunger, a hunger Quinn had not felt in him before.

Then Quentin was kissing his lips, and Quinn tasted the saltiness of his own blood. Quentin’s tongue was in his mouth, making a sweep of it. He gashed himself on Quinn’s fangs, but he seemed not to notice at all. Not even when he blood mixed with Quinn’s and flowed freely between them.

He wound his stick-like fingers up into Quinn’s hair, and Quinn heard himself moan softly, his breath stirring the loose curls at Quentin’s temples.

“Oh, my blood,” Quentin breathed, his face pressed into the bend of Quinn’s throat. “Oh son of Babylon the Great. Oh child of iniquity…”


	7. Chapter 7

After Quinn had taken his leave, Lestat was granted a handful of delectable minutes alone with Louis. It warmed his heart to see his first love so little changed from their younger days, and for a moment he allowed himself to imagine a simpler world, with no Quinn Blackwood or Quentin Compson in it. Almost at once, he was ashamed, but the dream clung as stubbornly as a memory.

Louis was patient, regal, coolly tolerant of Lestat’s caresses. He did nothing to encourage them and only the bare minimum necessary to hold Lestat’s interest. It was an old game; one that, Lestat was delighted to realize, Louis still played like a grand master. He consented when Lestat pressed his hand, but would not allow him to stroke his hair. When Lestat showered him with poetry, Louis pretended he had not heard.

He knew that he was being punished, though for the life of him he could not say precisely why. His transgressions existed only in Louis’ mind, but that made them his, and so Lestat loved them.

Soon, all too soon, he heard the front door open again. Louis drew away, and he sat with his knees pressed modestly together. Lestat had trouble looking away, but when at last he managed to tear his eyes from him, he realized he was being watched from the doorway.

He had expected it to be Quinn, come to sulk and offer half-hearted apologies. But it was not Quinn.

“Louis, you have come to see me?” Quentin said. “You have come to claim me, sir?”

There was a tremor in his voice, a shadow on his brow. This boy, who had faced down his death at Lestat’s hands with little more than weary acceptance, he was frightened now. Lestat felt a surge of pity, of tenderness, just as he always had for orphans and foundlings and strays.

“It remains to be seen,” Louis replied, rising from his seat.

Quentin came forward, taking each step carefully, placing one foot in front of the other as if he were walking on a wire. He extended his hand; Louis clasped it briefly. That was all.

Lestat felt suddenly uncomfortable.

“Sit, Quentin,” he said, rising from his seat. He took Quentin by the shoulders and guided him down.

There was the sound of scuffed feet from the foyer, and a moment later Quinn shuffled in, his shoulders slumped and his expression wary and beaten. He kept his head down, but his blue eyes moved swiftly beneath his lashes, darting from face to face. To Lestat, it seemed he had the guilty expression of a man who has arrived at a party uninvited.

“Come, Quinn,” Quentin said. “Come inside. I am so glad you are all here with me…”

He didn’t sound particularly glad at all, but he was convincing enough to entice Quinn inside. He took a seat in one of the straight-backed chairs, beautiful to look at but murder on the back. Little kissing noises squeaked out of the corners of his mouth as he sucked his fangs. He was doing it frantically now, but he did not even seem aware of it.

Lestat came around behind the chair and set a hand on his shoulder. Quinn flinched from him, but he quieted down. Lestat was taken aback. He had seen Quinn at his worst, barely sane, but he had never seen him look so whipped before. Lestat stroked his shoulder but it did not seem to comfort him; if anything, it only made him draw into himself more.

“You must forgive me,” Louis said, facing Quentin now, either unaware of what Lestat was doing or putting on a convincing show of it. “I could hardly have been expected to know that you lived. I hope you have not expended any great effort searching for me.”

“On the contrary, sir,” Quentin said. “I was not searching for you at all. I came to New Orleans to find Lestat and to ask him to honor a request of mine.”

“What request?”

“It does not matter to you and I.”

“You ought to have known, Lestat does not appreciate intruders into his territory. Usually, he kills them.” Here, at last, he looked over at Quinn. “He has been known to make exceptions, though.”

“Yes, I knew,” Quentin said softly. “It is no secret. But, upon my honor, I can be dead just as well in New Orleans or in Harvard or in the house of his father. Sir, upon my honor, it makes no difference where a man is dead.”

“Quentin…?” Quinn gasped out. He half rose from the chair, but then fell back as if he had been dealt a blow. Lestat was beginning to understand, but he scarce believed it. That his cautious, guarded, cynical Tarquin could have been taken in so easily.

And even though he knew that Quinn hated having his thoughts read, Lestat reached out for him with his mind. Just a gentle touch, such that he would never know. He felt the churning in Quinn’s breast, and he felt the brand upon his lips, as if a hot iron had been pressed to them.

Lestat frowned, for it seemed that half of Quinn’s troubles could be traced back to reading too much into a kiss.

Louis did not even look at them. “Do you want to die, Quentin?”

“I do not,” he said, shivering. “Only sometimes… But it is needful.”

Lestat felt Quinn draw in a sobbing breath. He moved his hand to the back of his neck, stroking up under his hair. Quinn shook him off with a toss of his head, and Lestat realized then that he was not the first person to touch him there this night. Someone else had beaten him to it, and Quinn preferred the memory of him.

“Be careful,” Louis said, and with only a tilt of his head he became utterly beautiful and utterly without mercy. “Be careful to whom you say such things. Eventually you may find someone willing to take you up on them.”

“Please. I am not brave. It isn’t my fault. Please…”

“I find that there are certain acts for which even depraved, Godless creatures have very little tolerance.”

Quentin started suddenly to his feet. His eyes sought the door, but he did not move toward it. He remained standing bolt upright, trembling, his skin pale as death and his mouth hanging open as if the words he wanted to say had all suicided within it.

“Will you not defend yourself, Quentin? Is all your great pride but vanity, then?”

“I did not know, sir,” Quentin whispered. “I did not know you hated me so…”

With a sigh, Louis rose. Quentin did not turn to him, did not move at all; even his breathing seemed to have stopped. Louis reached out, touching the end of one of his frayed curls, winding it around the tip of his finger.

“I don’t hate you. I don’t understand, but…”

Here, he trailed off, and he was silent for what seemed a long time. Lestat was keenly aware of the ticking of the clock in the hall, though he had never really noticed it before. It was loud now, painfully loud, calling him back into time.

“Regardless,” Louis continued at last. “You are mine, and I yours. And I have not forgotten why I took your blood. Why I gave you my own. I didn’t want to, but at the last second… at the last second…”

Quentin spun around suddenly to face him. “Yes, yes. I waited that long, too, before I decided to swim.”

Louis did not seem as moved by this as Quentin had calculated he would be. He reached out, grasping Louis’ sleeve in his hand and clinging to it fast. “Forgive me…”

“It isn’t my place to,” Louis replied.

“If not yours, then whose?”

“I don’t know the answer to that.”

Quentin seemed about to turn away again, but Louis caught him before he could. He tilted Quentin’s face up, pressing a dry kiss to his smooth, white cheek.

“It’s all in the past, Quentin,” he said quietly. “It is long past now. Try to remember that. Try to get yourself right.”

“Yes, sir.” When Louis let him go again, Quentin lowered his eyes with the guilty blush of a very young child. Louis stroked the boy’s hair and clothes back into some semblance of order, and then he straightened up.

“Lestat?”

“Yes, my love?”

“I wish to see the city of my birth. Escort me.”

Lestat looked down at Quinn. His head was bent, his expression hidden. He was not shivering anymore, but he certainly wasn’t back on solid ground. Louis noticed the momentary hesitation, and he smiled. “We’ll leave the kids with the babysitter. Now, come.”

“Of course…” Lestat said. Slowly, he patted Quinn’s shoulder. He knew then, as he had, he supposed, known for some time now, that he loved Quinn still. For a moment, he considered telling him as much, but in the end he decided against it. Quinn would almost certainly not like it. Such was the relationship they had.

He withdrew, none too quickly, as if he still held out some small measure of hope that Quinn would call him back. Louis took his hand. His touch was like a jolt of cold electricity on Lestat’s bare skin.

“Let’s go,” he said, and Lestat had no choice but to follow him out.

***

Though he had made no plans for an evening out, Lestat followed his instincts and they, as usual, guided him rightly.

They dined at an old place they used to go too, one of the few that had survived the inexorable march of time, and then Lestat led the way across the sound to the city park. They broke into the sculpture garden, and for a while they wandered in silence amidst the stone sentinels and the moonlight. Louis seemed in high spirits, and Lestat rallied his courage and approached him.

He wrapped his arms around Louis’ waist from behind, pulling him back against his chest. Louis favored him with a tiny, secretive smile, and his tossed his head so that his hair fell away from his throat.

“Did you really miss me terribly?”

“Every day, my love. Every hour.”

He moved a hand along the ridge of Louis’ belt, nudging up under the hem of his tee-shirt to stroke the ribbon of skin above his jeans. Louis almost never dressed up anymore. Once, he had told Lestat that a refined manner could not be affected by fancy clothes, nor hidden by shabby ones. Lestat was inclined to agree, though he also thought that fancy clothes never hurt anyone.

But right now, he wasn’t complaining. Louis’ loose jeans and untucked shirt allowed easy access to the soft and blood-warmed flesh underneath.

All at once, Louis pulled away. He wandered a few steps, and inspected the folds in the gown of a sculpture of a woman.

Lestat watched his turned back, his heart aching for the beauty of it all. “I suppose you want me to explain about Quinn.”

“Not at all,” Louis said. “I know you have powerful whims.”

Encouraged, Lestat ventured after him. “To be honest, I only took him in because he reminded me of you.”

“What a thing to say.” Louis turned abruptly, putting a hand up and setting it on Lestat’s chest as if to hold him at bay. “Now that, I do want you to explain.”

Lestat shrugged helplessly. “He was lonely. It seemed like he was always alone, even when he was surrounded by other people, and I had the impression that he needed very badly to have someone recognize him for his good qualities.”

“That hardly sounds like me at all.”

“That wasn’t the only reason, though. It’s hard to explain. It was more a feeling than anything concrete. Though I do remember… there was something inside of him. A horrible darkness. Like a fury he could not expend.”

“Did you sleep with him, Lestat?”

“Pardon me?”

“Did you make love to him?”

Lestat narrowed his eyes. “How bold, Louis. You’ve never asked me such a thing before. It thrills me…”

“Answer my question,” Louis said, a hint of amusement in his voice. Lestat barely managed to suppress a grin; he did love when Louis had the notion to play at Inquisitor.

“I suppose that we did,” he replied. “A time or two.”

Louis pursed his lips primly. “Shame on you, Lestat. He is a little hussy. A dirty boy.”

“I guess he’s been around the block.”

“I was, of course, a virgin when I came to you.”

“So you’ve always said.”

Louis’ eyes flashed. Lestat heeded it well; he knew it was the only warning he was likely to get. “And you have always believed.”

“You’re such a Puritan, Louis.”

“And you are such a Libertine, Lestat.” With a touch of his hand, he smoothed his black hair. Then he brushed a mote of nonexistent dust from his clothes, and tugged at the hem of his shirt to straighten it. These small absolutions done, he breathed a long sigh.

“I tire of this place. I want you to take me home at once.”

Without even waiting to see if Lestat was with him, he turned and disappeared into the night.


	8. Chapter 8

Lestat had been certain when they left the sculpture garden together that Louis had wanted to be taken to bed. He would never say as much, not in so many words, but Lestat knew that if he was patient, if he bided his time and waited for the right moment, things would begin to happen.

Tonight, however, he didn’t have to be patient for long. Once they were back at the manor, Louis grew bored of his coy games almost at once. It seemed a great relief to him when Lestat led him back to their boudoir, and he let himself be undressed without a single fit or complaint. Coming from Louis, that was as good as saying he was glad to be home. And Lestat could feel all of his old devotion returning, all of the old tenderness and the old passion, welling up out of that inexhaustible well of love within him.

They exhausted each other quickly, knocking all the bedclothes to the floor in their fury and rattling the headboard against the wall. Finally, Louis fell back on the now bare mattress and, half-laughing, begged for, “No more, no more”.

Lestat retrieved one of the pillows and a light sheet from the pile on the floor and made him comfortable. While Louis dozed, pale and angelically smiling, Lestat sat up and watched him. His body was pleasantly sore, but already the small aches and pains were healing. It was too hot to sleep, and he was gripped by a nervous energy. He was happy, yes, but not content. Louis was here at his side, where he had always belonged, but Lestat would never be satisfied until he had unraveled all the mysteries that had come to roost under his roof.

He got up and dressed, in his own trousers and, unable to resist the urge to brag a little, Louis’ shirt; then he went out through the French door that opened onto the back patio.

The upstairs windows were open, and the one that looked into Quinn’s room produced a cacophony that shattered the perfect stillness of the night. He had a record on the turntable, and the volume turned up all the way. It was the song that went,

_It gets the worst at night_  
With nothing on my mind  
But you

Briefly, Lestat wondered of Quentin was up there with him, if they were nursing their hurts together, and he hoped that Quentin would not break his heart. Between his maker, and his mother, and the thing that may or may not have been his twin, Quinn had suffered enough heartbreaks to last him a lifetime.

As Lestat came around the corner of the house, he saw that the swing on the side porch was swaying back and forth as if pushed by the breeze, but there was no breeze tonight. He stepped closer, and a dark form took shape. It was a long moment before Lestat recognized Quentin sitting there.

From Quinn’s room, the words of the song floated down to him.

_There ain’t nothing left for me in Tennessee  
Because I know you’re not awake thinking of me_

Lestat went closer. Quentin did not turn when he approached, nor even lift his head. He sat with his knees pressed together and his hands folded in his lap.

“Are you waiting on someone?” Lestat asked quietly.

It seemed to take a great effort, but Quentin lifted his head. “Lestat…?”

“It’s a beautiful night. Can I keep you company for a while?”

“Please, sit down.”

Quentin slid over for him, and when Lestat sat down beside him so that their hips touched, Quentin shied even further away, wedging himself into the far corner of the swing. Lestat watched him curiously. He longed to leap to Louis’ defense, to explain away his moods and his harshness, to assure Quentin that he only seemed cold at first.

Instead, he only said, “I thought you might be with Tarquin. I think he’s taken a liking to you.”

“Quinn is as precious to me as my own flesh and blood,” Quentin said in a voice barely above a whisper.

“I don’t understand him anymore,” Lestat said. “I thought he was simple; that he was troubled, but not beyond my reach. I thought he was just a fixer-upper. But it’s as if he moves away from me by degrees, like a mirage that is ever receding no matter how long you approach it. Every time he sees fit to show me something of himself, I find two more secrets that he will not tell me. Am I making any sense to you?”

“Yes, Lestat.”

“I get the impression he tells you things, though.”

“I suppose he does. But I cannot explain him to you as if he were a mathematical proof. I can’t tell you his heart, Lestat, for I do not know it. I don’t know that much about any man, not even myself.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask,” Lestat said.

“Then I have been presumptuous. Pardon me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lestat said. “You know, you’re pretty sharp, Quentin.”

Quentin looked up at him. In this light, his eyes were very dark, and possessed of unfathomable depths. “Perhaps so.”

He turned away again. Lestat waited for him to say more, but he never did. He had retreated back into the same still, silent place he had been when Lestat had found him out here.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” Lestat said quietly. “Earlier, when you asked Louis to forgive you… What was that all about?”

“Did my words then trouble you?”

“I’ve been giving them some thought,” Lestat admitted. “Louis and I were apart for a long time, years and years, but I still can’t imagine the life he must have led. It’s as if he never existed without me, and maybe the other way around, too.”

“The forgiveness was for a grievous sin,” Quentin said. “Louis knows all my sins. He drew them out of me with the drawing of my blood.”

“We commit grievous sins every night,” Lestat replied.

“Not like this. And besides, when the sin was done, I was not yet what I am now. I did it knowing that I would die and face punishment in due time.”

Lestat’s lips inverted into a scowl. “You couldn’t have been much older than twenty when Louis found you. I don’t know what you could have done that was all that bad…”

“Nineteen,” Quentin said. “I was nineteen, and well past the Age of Accountability. And, as I suppose you know, some sins take but minutes.”

Lestat sighed. He was uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken towards the religious. Despite his experience with the subject, he had never quite felt he was on the most stable ground when discussing it.

“Listen to me,” he said at last. “Whatever you did, you’re not beyond redemption. Whatever it was, it can’t be worth a hundred years of grief. Anyone you could have possibly hurt has been dead for a long time now.”

“You sound like my father,” Quentin said, but with a dose more poison than most people put into those words.

“All right,” Lestat said. “I understand. I’ll drop it.”

The porch swing had stopped moving. Quentin pushed off with his heels and set it in motion again. Above them, the brackets creaked beneath their weight, as steady as a clock ticking off the second.

After a while, Lestat reached over and set his hand over Quentin’s. “You’re here, in my city, a guest in my house… Isn’t there anything I can do for you, Quentin? To make all this easier?”

He felt Quentin’s fingers stiffen under his own. “Kill me. Finish what you began when I first came here.”

“I can’t do that. Louis would be furious with me. Not to mention how much it would upset Tarquin…”

“Then do not make me empty promises, sir.”

“…and even then,” Lestat pressed on. “I might do it in spite of both of them, if I thought for a moment it was what you really wanted.”

“I have wanted it for so long now, I know not how to want for anything else.”

“No, you don’t.” Lestat patted his hand. “You only want to want it, but something holds you back. Because the sun rises in the east, the same as it always has, and you can find it there any time you need it.”

Quentin did not reply. The air around him hummed with a dull current of anger, all mixed up with frustration and fear and a deep, dreadful misery. Lestat took up his hand and squeezed it once. Quentin’s fingers were icy cold, and Lestat knew that he had not fed tonight and had no intention of doing so.

“I’d better go inside now,” Lestat said. “The guestroom is all made up for you.”

He got up and headed back to the house. It wasn’t until he passed under Quinn’s window that he realized the music had stopped. Without that racket to drown them out, voices would have carried a long way, and Lestat wondered if Quinn had overheard him and he was troubled by the notion but could not say exactly why.

***

Back in the boudoir once more, Lestat saw that Louis had not moved from the bed. He was curled on his side with the sheet pulled up to his chest, falling limply about him to suggest the lines of his body beneath. His eyes were closed, and his hands curled into half-fists.

He was too still to be asleep.

Lestat sat down beside him on the bed and reached over to stroke his hair. When Louis did not sir, Lestat bent so that his hip was up against Louis’ turned back and he was bowed over him in the attitude of the pieta. He kissed the corner of Louis’ mouth, and Louis’ lips twitched into a smile.

“How many times have I told you not to wear my things? You always stretch them out.”

“Sorry,” Lestat said.

“Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere at all.”

Lestat laid down, stretching out beside him, feeling all his angles and curves with only the single thin layer of clothing and the thinner layer of the sheet to separate them. The pillow had grown pleasantly cool in Lestat’s absence, and Louis’s body did not give off enough heat as to be stifling.

“You’ll stay this time, won’t you?” Lestat said impulsively.

“I’ll stay for a few weeks.”

“I wish you'd stay forever,” Lestat said. And he really meant it, though he felt that even his sincerity was just another part of the game they played. Louis would not stay and, in the end, Lestat would not even want him to. Every time their paths crossed, Lestat would swear things had changed between them, things would be different this time. But Lestat knew the ending was always the same: Louis always pulled away in coldness, or Lestat drove him there with his petty meanness. Only the order of events changed slightly, but never the outcome.

“Very well,” Louis said. “I will stay forever.”

Lestat smiled, though he knew that Louis was being utterly patronizing. “Thanks.”

Louis turned over to face him at last, the sheet twisting and slipping down to his waist. He put his arms around Lestat’s neck. “How strange that Quentin came to you…”

“Do we have to talk about Quentin right now?”

“No,” Louis said. “Not at all. But I just thought it was odd. It’s like you hold all of my missing pieces for me, Lestat. You are the final resting place of everything I have lost.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Lestat replied with a faint smile.

“Take it as you will.”

Lestat kissed him then, and he felt Louis’ body arching up into his own. He cupped his shoulder in his palm and stroked his hand along Louis’ bare side, feeling little jolts run through him all the way down, as if his hand were the circuit bridging a current.

Louis put his hands on Lestat’s chest, turning them outward at the wrists and splaying his fingers open. “I’m afraid we’ve made a dreadful mess of your bedroom.”

“Leave it,” Lestat said. “For now, just leave it.”


	9. Chapter 9

The sun rose, and the house slept. Then the sun set, and life stirred once more in the rooms.

Quinn was upstairs hunting for something to wear, feeling for all the world like he was donning armor to go into battle. He was seriously considering the suit and tie that he knew Lestat would have liked to see him in, when he got to thinking how it would look if he sauntered down the stairs in it. For one thing, he wouldn’t be able to carry it off. For another, no one was going to believe for a second that he had just decided out of the blue, on this particular night, to wear full evening dress.

Tossing the suit into a contemptuous heap on the floor of the closet, Quinn dropped back onto his bed. The problem, the thought, with hanging around Lestat for too long was that eventually everything you did became a matter of public record. Little details were bound to get lost in the telling, of course – Quinn said ‘Cat Power’, but Lestat heard ‘Alison Krauss’, and in the end he wrote ‘Dixie Chicks’ because he thought it sounded better – but all the important parts got put down sooner or later.

Quinn would be damned if he was going to let Lestat make him a sidekick in his own story. He’d fight that tooth and nail, right up until the moment Lestat wrote him out entirely. Better to give up his life, than to give up himself.

It wasn’t that he hated the books, or Lestat’s writing of them. It wasn’t that, exactly. At the end of the day, Quinn was a private person and it embarrassed him to see his own name in print, but he could not deny that there had been a time when Lestat’s books were a great comfort to him. When Lestat – even Lestat – had been an ideal to aspire towards.

Quinn could not remember when that had all changed. He could not even see where the ideal broke off and the real Lestat began, for they were closely intertwined. To his credit, Lestat had not lied very often, and almost never about himself.

The closet door hung open, hounding him. Quinn turned over on his side, facing away from it. He was plenty comfortable in his sleepclothes: a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and white Henley shirt. Maybe, he thought, he wouldn’t bother getting dressed at all.

On the opposite side of the bed was his bookcase, which he kept well-stocked with superhero trades and the soothing black spines of the Penguin Classics. _Justice League_ , but not _X-Men_. Hawthorne, but not Melville.

The bottom shelf was taken up by Lestat’s novels. All of them in pristine first editions, their spines stiff and their dust jackets still new and glossy. He had the paperbacks around here somewhere, and it was those that he had read and that were marked with creased covers and dog-eared pages. The hardbacks were not for reading, but for admiring, like souvenirs.

He reached over and pulled out _The Vampire Lestat_ , bending back the front cover just enough that he could read the inscription scratched on the endpaper.

 _Tarquin,_

 _May you grow old, and become tired, and be very bored always._

 _XOXO Lestat_

Will you sign this one? Quinn had said one night, a few weeks after he had come to live at Lestat’s estate. They’d finally worn his family down and gotten his things sent from Blackwood Farm, and over the course of the unpacking, the books had turned up.

Quinn had asked it with a wry smile, that nervous sarcasm he was always overdoing in this early days, afraid as he had been that Lestat wouldn’t get his humor.

And Lestat had said, I’ve never been to a book signing. What do people usually say?

You should put an insult, Quinn had answered. Just write the worst thing you can think of.

Lestat had carried the book away to find a pen, and when he’d brought it back they’d laughed a lot over the inscription. Not because it was funny, but because they had conspired together to make it.

Quinn clapped the book closed suddenly. He almost flung it away, but he stopped himself at the last moment and instead returned it to its place in the pristine row. No sense taking it out on a perfectly innocent book. Not that there was really anything to take out at all. Nothing but the same dull frustration and inescapable feeling for being caged; nothing at all new there.

He lay on his side for a while longer, trying to mount another attack on his closet. Quinn didn’t hear anyone come in, but when he turned only his back the door was open and Quentin was standing just inside, watching him in courteous silence.

Quinn bolted upright, smacking his head solidly on the bedstead. “Jesus…”

“Is something wrong, Quinn?” Quentin said.

“You scared the shit out of me, that’s what.” Quinn rubbed his head irritably. “Get in here and shut the door.”

Quentin closed the door so carefully that the latch falling back into place made no sound. Quinn swung his legs over so he was sitting on the edge of the bed, and he patted the mattress beside him for Quentin to join him.

“What’s wrong?” Quinn said. “Lestat’s not looking for me or anything, is he?”

“No, Quinn. Only I.”

“Only you… what?”

“Only I am looking for you.”

Quinn started to respond, but then Quentin’s hand brushed against his knee. A delicious jolt ran up his leg and collected in a knot at his crotch. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth; he felt as if he had forgotten how to speak.

He dipped his head and let Quentin kiss him, just as smoothly as if they had rehearsed it a dozen times before now. Quentin’s mouth was slow, precise, ravenous, just as Quinn remembered it from the night before. That proved that it had really happened, that he hadn’t just imagined it. Would to God that he could have only imagined it…

Quinn made a muffled, unconvincing noise of protest between their pressed lips, but already his arms were around Quentin’s neck, already he was tugging him down so they fell side-by-side on the bed. Quentin’s fingers combed gently through Quinn’s hair, but nothing else about him was gentle at all. He thrust his tongue fiercely into Quinn’s mouth, and Quinn tasted the bitter metallic brininess of his blood, like tough and stringy meat. A little bloodplay was to be expected every time flesh and fangs came to occupy the same space, but, to Quentin, the blood seemed to be an endpoint. When Quinn tried to pull away to catch his breath, Quentin snapped his teeth shut on his lower lip so that one fang went clean through, labret style.

They both came up coughing and sputtering. Quinn passed the back of his arm over his mouth, leaving a dull rust-colored smear on the sleeve of his Henley. He probed the wound with the tip of his tongue, but it was already healing shut.

“Shit,” he said. He could hear his heart racing in his ears, feel it throbbing at every pulse point, all down and through him. “Goddamn.”

Quentin watched him with lazy, half-lidded eyes, like an inexperienced drinker who’s just had one too many. His tongue flicked out and made a slow search along his lower lip, but he’d already swallowed down all the blood that had come out in that first great gout.

“Well, Quinn?” he said.

“Yeah,” Quinn replied. His voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference one way or the other. “Yeah, sure thing. Let me just put on some music.”

He stood up, and his legs nearly crumpled out from under him. His whole body was wracked by tremors. Slowly, carefully, he limped over to the shelf of records. He grabbed the first one that caught his eye that he knew was loud enough and rough-edged enough to make Lestat keep his distance. His hands shook when he put it on the turntable, and he paid no attention to the side, nor onto which song he let the needle fall.

The first ringing guitar chord cut through some of the fog in his brain. It was a crazy reason to be all shook up, he told himself, no matter which way you looked at it.

Quentin may have had his secrets, his mysteries, but there was nothing secret or mysterious here. Nothing about a pretty face in his bed that Quinn didn’t know inside and out, upside and down. Here, at last, was a game where he held all the cards.

Quinn came back across the room with a hip-swagger in his step. Floor to ceiling was quickly filling up with music, as heavy drums came in, and then a second guitarist picking out a solo.

Remembering some of his old charms, Quinn lifted Quentin’s glasses deftly off the bridge of his nose. “How about letting me see those pretty eyes?”

“Whatever you like, Quinn,” Quentin said politely.

Quinn sat down, kissed him again. This time, he cupped his hand behind Quentin’s neck, tilting his face up. Quentin bent gracefully, as if relieved to be relinquishing control. Quinn dropped his other hand to Quentin’s thigh, sliding it up to the hollow where his hip joined with his pelvis. Even through his clothes he could feel the heat of Quentin’s straining cock, the only warm spot on his entire body.

Then, all at once, Quentin seized him by the wrist, and Quinn felt himself lifted up. Turned over in a single motion, carried along by that deceptive old-vampire strength. He hit the mattress laid out on his back, his arms up above his head, pinned just as neat as you please. Quentin knelt astride his hips, leaning over him and putting his weight on the hand that held Quinn’s wrists.

He bent as if to kiss him, then feinted at the last moment. His teeth closed around Quinn’s earlobe, teasing it, then he moved down, kissing Quinn’s rough-stubbled jaw, nipping at his throat.

White lights went off behind Quinn’s closed eyelids. A haze of need fell over him, blotting out everything else, and his body twisted up mindlessly against Quentin’s. He pulled at his trapped wrists, bucked up his hips so that their crotches rubbed together. He could hear the little mindless noises that slipped from his mouth, the little gasps and moans, the aborted attempts at a name, but he didn’t know where they were coming from.

And then, Quentin stopped.

Poised above Quinn’s body, his mouth still pressed to the hollow of his shoulder, Quentin’s whole form went rigid and still. Slowly, he raised himself onto his knees. Gasping, Quinn blinked his eyes open.

“Quentin, what the hell…?”

He stopped, for he could see that Quentin couldn’t hear him. His black eyes had slipped out of focus, as if the lenses had inverted and instead of looking out they now looked inward, and something only he could glimpse.

“This…” he said.

“What?” Quinn said, but even before the word was out he knew it was a stupid thing to ask. Because Quentin was listening to the song now, really truly hearing the song when it said,

 _Keep your drawers on, girl, it ain't worth the fight  
By the time you drop them I'll be gone  
And you'll be right where they fall the rest of your life_

A cold fire blazed up in Quentin’s eyes, and Quinn shrank away from it. “Shit. I, uh. I got some Dolly I can put on. Or some Loretta…?”

Too late for that now, though. Quentin was already up and off of him, and he moved so fast that Quinn didn’t see where he went. It was the sound of the French doors swinging open that he noticed first, before he even realized that Quentin was long gone.

Quinn sat up, dazed, wincing as his erection shifted inside his pants. He tried to be angry at Quentin for leaving him blueballed, but it was no good. He was shaking too badly to work up a good rage.

The French doors hung open, sagging brokenly on their hinges. Quentin had flung them back so hard that he knocked them all off-kilter. No sense going to look for him, Quinn thought. The way he’d been moving, he might as well be in Texas by now.

Quinn glared down at his hands, willing them to quit their trembling. When he’d gotten them a fair bit under control, he reached over and fished his cigarettes out of the drawer next to the bed. He lit one, brought it up to his mouth.

The same song was still going. It was a long one.

 _Zip City it's a good thing that they built a wall around you  
Zip up to Tennessee then zip back down to Alabama_

Quentin Compson, Quinn thought. Of Someplace, Mississippi. It was all he knew about him, all any of them knew, except for Louis maybe. But Louis wasn’t talking, and Quinn knew that if he wanted to rest easy under his own roof ever again, he was going to have to find out more. He was going to have to know it all.


	10. Chapter 10

Quinn smoked and paced for what seemed hours, until, at last, he heard Louis and Lestat leave for the evening. After they were gone, he turned down the lights in his bedroom, leaving only the small lamp by his bed burning. It gave the illusion, to anyone who happened to look up from outside, that no one was in.

He sat down with his computer, feeling a sudden clearness of thought and forthrightness of intention. Somewhere out there, Quentin was waiting for him. But it would do no good to seek him in the city; Quinn knew that he had to go back, back into the unforgetting slipstream of time. Somewhere back there was the codebreaker, the key that would unlock all of Quentin’s secrets.

Though he didn’t have much more than a name to go on, there were times a name could get you far.

Quinn started with Google. Hits came back, and a whole slew of them at that. Quentin MacLachan Compson (Wikipedia informed him) was a governor of Mississippi. Elected in 1836, he served one term.

The Mississippi legislature site had more information for him, including a faded black and white photo of a hard-eyed, rather asymmetrical man who may or may not have been dead when he sat for the picture. Two great sideburns tufted from his temples. They were the kind that had been groomed so that they grew around and met up with the mustache.

Quinn wondered why Louis couldn’t have sideburns like that. Maybe then they could have gotten along better.

The old governor was not his Quentin, not by a long shot, but the longer Quinn studied the picture, the more he thought there might be something familiar about that high Scotch brow, that bitterly intelligent squint around the eyes. Besides, how many Quentin Compsons could there really be out there anyway?

The biography that went with the picture was brief, unenthusiastic. The old governor seemed to have been singularly unaccomplished in office. There wasn’t much more than had been on Wikipedia, but there was the name of a town that caught Quinn’s eye. The governor had come from Jefferson, Mississippi, and, after his term, he had retired to his holdings there.

Quinn jumped back to the tab with Wiki open in it. He searched for Jefferson, but no results came back, not even partial ones. Still, it was a start. Stroking his jaw thoughtfully, Quinn mapped it all out in his mind.

There was a family. A good, old, established family. Well entrenched, even before the Civil War. That was the kind of mess Quentin had come up out of, and Quinn had to brace himself to keep his heart from turning away from him right then. No, none of it was Quentin’s fault, and Quinn knew as well as anyone that a man couldn’t help who he was born to.

There was more to the story, though, Quinn could feel it More than an incompetent governor and a rich family and a town that didn’t seem to quite exist. He tried Google for Jefferson, Mississippi and found only the mention on the old governor’s bio, and a single other hit, in reference to a minor Confederate general on a re-enactor site.

Jason Lycurgus Compson, son of the old governor. He’d failed at Shiloh, and been routed at Resaca, and he’d been sent home in 1864 with a gangrenous bullet in his leg, to die at the familial estate. ‘But he recovered’, the site noted, and then it said nothing more.

Frustrated by the dead end, but with a new plan already taking shape, Quinn tried one of the better genealogy websites. They wanted money before they’d let him see the historical documents; grudgingly Quinn paid up.

There was nothing from Jefferson, Mississippi save a few old state census records that predated the Civil War. He tried the name Compson instead, and before his eyes flashed the faded photograph of the old, failed governor. But then, lodged below the picture, a single entry, a certificate of death.

Quentin was the name on it, and the date of death was June 3rd, 1910. The cause of death was listed as drowning, and the body was listed as unrecovered.

Here, at last, was something. Quinn tried the archives of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, but there was nothing about the death. A rich man’s son, drowned at the age of nineteen or twenty seemed like it ought to have made the news, but Quinn scoured the old scanned copies of the paper for a full month in either direction and he found nothing.

He slumped back, glaring at the screen as if he could intimidate it into surrendering its secrets.

Drowned, he thought. Drowned. But in what water? The Mississippi was plenty good for that kind of thing, though it was 60 miles from Jackson. But what was it Quentin had said to him, on that night they had walked back from downtown together?

I was there on the bank of the river, he had told Quinn then. I was there on the bank of the River Charles.

This time, Quinn started with the papers. The Boston Herald was useless, and the Globe was even worse. On an impulse, he tried the archives of the Harvard University student paper, and he found what he was looking for almost at once:

_‘Campus Staggered by Tragic Death of Outgoing Freshman’_

The article was only a paragraph long, but Quinn had to struggle to read it. His eyes kept leaping ahead, snatching up phrases out of order, seemingly at random. Discovered missing in the late hours of June 2nd… drowned in the waters off the Great Bridge… volunteers from the rowing team will drag the river for a body…

The article was written with a suspicious note of authority for an account of a drowning with no body and no witnesses. You didn’t have to be some kind of genius to see what was really going on. It had been no accident; no ill-advised, drunken, late night swim gone bad. The polite condolences that capped off the end of the article were written in the same hushed tones that always surrounded a suicide.

They could look for a corpse all the wanted, but the best efforts of the crew team would never turn one up. For Quentin had found something else out there on the bridge that night, the bridge where he had gone to seek his death.

Quinn had suspected as much, but seeing it all spelled out there before was like having an icy needle driven slowly, slowly into his heart.

He sat back, breathing hard as if he had just run a sprint. Here was the truth, and yet it was no truth at all. He was left holding a laundry list of deeds and names, but he was no closer to understanding Quentin than he had been when he began.

Suddenly ravenous for more, Quinn began to speed forward through the archives. There was no follow up to the story of the drowning, but three days later, another headline caught his eye.

_‘Bizarre Death at On-Campus Dormitory’_

This article was more detailed than the last one. A murder was lurid, a suicide merely embarrassing. The victim was an outgoing Freshman, found dead in his room ‘excised of a great quantity of blood’. His name was given as Shreve MacKenzie. Quinn did not have to go back to the article about Quentin to know that it was the same name as his roommate.

Here, Quinn thought, at last, was something of substance. He went forward, and the trail grew cold almost at once. It didn’t heat up again until three months further on, in an edition published at the inception of the next semester.

_‘Moving Day Visitor Falls Prey to Riverside Ripper’_

"The entire campus finds itself in a state of agitation today,” read the article. “The maiden sister of one of our Harvard men has become the latest victim of the Riverside Ripper.”

That didn’t sound at all like the timid, mannered style he had come to expect from the timid, mannered journalism undergrads who wrote for the Crimson. Quinn went back to the city papers. They had failed him before, but when he searched ‘Riverside Ripper’ they came through.

The cutsey name had been a dead giveaway: they were deep into serial killer territory. The one called the Ripper had murdered sixteen women in Boston and Cambridge before disappearing off the scene entirely in 1913. He snatched the girls off the subway, from the backrooms of bars, out of their own bedrooms. Some articles said the victim’s throats had been cut, but others were seemingly more honest. They said they had been torn out, as if by teeth.

One of the broadsheets had a photograph accompanying it: a portrait of a tall, thin, serious girl with her blonde hair in an elaborate up-do. She looked familiar, that was Quinn’s first thought. He would swear by it, in fact. She was the spitting image of the girl in the alley, the one who had been Quentin’s first victim in New Orleans.

Quinn felt a breath of cold air on the back of his neck. He looked up from the computer screen, blinking away the spots of light that clouded his eyes, and turned toward the broken French door. He had just enough time to register a silhouette standing out on the porch, framed against the night sky, before it hit him like an oncoming train.

The wind went out of him in an undignified sob. Quinn was knocked clear of his chair, and he cartwheeled across the carpet in a painful pastiche of every slapstick comedy in existence, until, mercifully, he came to rest, heels up and head down, against the far wall.

The lower half of a body stepped into view. Quinn craned his neck as far as he could without jostling any of his bruised parts, trying to get a look at the top half too.

“Quentin…?” he rasped.

He got no reply. Quentin only reached down, one-handed, and hauled him off the floor.

“Ow ow ow!” Quinn protested, and then he was in flight once more. Quentin heaved him overhand, like he was throwing a pitch.

Quinn’s body arched gracefully through the air, right up until the moment he clipped his shoulder in the bedpost. It sent him skittering off to one side, into the corner of the room where he came to rest in an exhausted heap.

Again, Quentin came towards him, and Quinn struggled to sort out the impossible tangle of his limbs.

“Quentin, wait… Shit. Just wait…”

A hand closed around his throat, a tender folding of fingers around the delicate column of his windpipe. Quinn swallowed hard, bracing himself, but Quentin did not squeeze. He pulled Quinn right-side up and put his back against the wall. He had to hold his arm nearly vertical to do it, but he managed to lift Quinn’s feet off the carpet.

If he’d stretched his toes, Quinn could have put solid ground underneath them once more, but he didn’t dare. No need to do anything to make Quentin angry.

“I can explain…” Quinn said harshly, figuring he’d go first and then Quentin could fill him in on just what the hell he thought he was doing.

“You were prying.”

“I hardly saw anything!” Quinn said, but before he could get the last word out Quentin tightened his grip and turned Quinn’s voice into a sound like a snarl of radio static.

“You will find nothing else. It is not a matter of public record.”

“All right,” Quinn whispered brokenly. His eyes were filling with tears. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t prying, though. I just wanted to know…”

“Know what, Quinn?”

“I don’t know. The truth about you.”

“Why?” Quentin demanded.

“I was worried about you. I was afraid for you.”

Quentin narrowed his eyes. He watched Quinn’s face for what seemed a long time, and then, at last, he lowered him back to the ground.

“The truth will not ease your mind, Quinn.”

“Well, I didn’t want to know it for my sake.” Quinn rubbed his bruised throat. “But I’m not going to argue with you about it, not if you’re just going to kick my ass.”

“She was my sister,” Quentin blurted out.

Quinn stopped moving, stopped even feeling the ache of his injuries. They had faded out, like so much background noise. “Excuse me?”

“My sister, younger than I, but by only a few years. If you have never had a sister, Quinn, then you cannot know what it is to see her go with men and not have any shame about it at all. She had no reason to have no shame, for they would have done what she said even if she had not gone with them. Do you see?”

“I don’t really think so,” Quinn admitted. This wasn’t the direction he had expected the conversation to take. For all he had prepared himself, Quentin had managed to surprise him right out of the gate.

“Listen, Quinn. I did not make her do it because I wanted it. I made her do it because it was the one sin that would damn us both in kind. If she was to be damned, then let me also be with her in the fire. Do you understand? Let us be together in purgation, let it burn us clean again, so that even the deed would not matter anymore.”

Quinn’s faced must have shown blank incomprehension, for Quentin turned away from him in disgust. “So you see, I have committed incest, Quinn.”

“Oh,” Quinn said. And then again, with dawning realization. “Oooh…”

“I committed it, and only I. But she let me, Quinn. I think it was all the kindness in her, all the terrible kindness. All the rank and wretched love in her.”

“Hey, look,” Quinn said. “You were young. Stupid shit happens, right?”

“It was not stupid, Quinn.”

Quentin’s eyes came back to his. They were so dark now that there was no line between iris and pupil, as if the one had swollen to obliterate the other completely. “I damned her. And she I. But, alas, I made one terrible miscalculation. For her damnation was in death, and mine is in life. To be this, always. To know that, somewhere, she waits for me.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Quinn said carefully. He was reaching back to Sunday School now, trying to find where Quentin’s theology went wrong, because to set it right would be a lot less uncomfortable for everyone. “But, listen, if you repent, if you truly ask forgiveness, all the way down to your heart…”

Quentin was not listening. “A child was conceived out of my whoredom. A girlchild, called Quentin, in remembrance of her brother, dead and with all his bones washed out to sea. The black blood was in her, Quinn. The curse had gone down all the way to her marrow. She fled the house of her father, but she did not make it far. How far did she make it, Quinn? Tell me, how far?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

Quentin pulled back his upper lip as if he were trying to smile, but the effect was grotesque to behold. “Because she was your grandmother.”

Quinn felt as if he had been dealt a blow. Blindly, he reached back, pressing his palms flat against the wall, digging them in so he could have something solid to cling to. “What are you telling me?”

“Only that she coveted the Blackwood fortune. Your carpetbagger fortune. Your Yankee money. She took after her mother, long-legged and blonde. She had a presence about her, like a serene wilderness, as if, when you were with her, you walked in a grove of stately ancient trees. And she understood what her mother had not, that she could take as well as she could give. It was no trouble for her to secure a husband. She certainly had her pick. But she did not know about the taint in her blood, Quinn. She did not know about the defect she carried. Passed down, and down, and down…”

“Look, if you’re talking about two-headed mutant babies or something, I don’t know anything about that, I swear.”

“I’m talking about the curse!” Quentin snapped. “Wreck and ruin. Death and misfortune. Visited upon the heads of seven generations. That, you will know something about.”

“I don’t…” Quinn started to say, but then something caught his eye. A black cloud was coalescing in the air at Quentin’s temples, making a kind of shadowy halo around his head.

“O ye children of Cain,” Quentin was saying. “O ye condemned to eternal wandering…”

Quinn only stared at the growing shadow. As it swelled in size, it moved away, retreating back into the corner of the room, roiling and churning up there, until, at last, it parted down the center, and for a split second Quinn caught sight of a face. A face that was just like his own.

“Shit, not you again!” was all he had time to say.

Goblin broke apart into fragments and the fragments burst in small tongues of bright red flame. A sound tore through Quinn’s head, like a twister passing through, so loud that it drowned out even the noise of shattering glass.

All the windows in the room imploded. The screen on Quinn’s computer shattered outward. Even the lenses of Quentin’s spectacles broke into shards. All the slivers of glass were swept up by a careless wind, and Quinn saw them spinning towards him, saw them encircle him.

He saw Quentin’s arms come up, bowing around his head to protect it from the glass, but that was the last thing he saw before he saw only darkness.


	11. Chapter 11

They returned from a leisurely hunt and a moonlight stroll along the river bank, which Lestat had taken great care to call ‘romantic’ at every available opportunity. They had only been gone three hours by Louis’ calculation, but in their absence the house had gone to hell.

In the front parlor, Quinn was stretched, half-swooning, on the sofa. Quentin, in shirt sleeves soaked with blood, was crouched beside him, dabbing at his temples with a damp handkerchief as he might with a woman who had fainted.

Lestat moved first, springing forward and seizing Quinn’s hand. “What is it? What happened?”

He was worried, yes, Louis thought, but he was excited, too. For Lestat fancied himself like the character in the book upon which all his literary aspirations were based: a man who things happened to. Less the irritating grammatical error, Louis had to admit the description was rather apt. Lestat courted trouble, and trouble courted him in return. It was his second greatest love.

Quentin had fallen back a step. He seemed relieved to commend Quinn into Lestat’s care.

Louis set a hand on his shoulder. Quentin started, and stopped himself from flinching away only by tremendous effort. Here was his child, Louis thought with an obscure melancholy. Here was his only son, and he had practically never touched him before.

“Are you hurt?”

“No, sir,” Quentin said.

“Whose blood is that? Not Quinn’s…?

“No, sir. It is mine. But I’m not hurt.”

“Let me see,” Louis said.

Grudgingly, Quentin lifted his arms for Louis to inspect. There were numerous shards of glass embedded in the skin between his wrists and elbows. The wounds had long since closed, the flesh grown over the deeper slivers, so that his arms were crossed with raised red welts.

“Those will have to be taken out,” Louis said with a frown. “Go sit.”

Before Quentin could move, a tremendous crash shook the upper floor of the house. Lestat bolted to his feet was about to leap in the direction of the stairs, when Quinn rallied himself enough to grab hold of his arm.

“Lestat, don’t,” he rasped. “Please, don’t…”

Louis watched what happened next very closely. Lestat relented, sitting down on the edge of the couch, stroking his fingers back through Quinn’s stringy, disheveled hair. “Whatever it is, I’ll go take care of it. Don’t worry.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Tarquin…” Lestat started to say.

“Lestat. It’s my brother.”

This gave Lestat pause. His eyes shifted again towards the stairs, and another resounding crash of toppled furniture echoed down them in reply.

“That’s not possible.”

“I saw him,” Quinn said. “Ask Quentin, he saw him too.”

“There was something up there,” Quentin said quietly. “Yes, sir, I did see something foul and unnatural.”

Lestat frowned. “But I thought we—“

“Yeah,” Quinn replied. “We did. And obviously he’s pretty pissed about it.”

Irritated that he was not party to their insinuations, Louis gripped Quentin’s shoulder hard and marched him over to one of the straight-backed chairs. He pulled a second one up beside it, took out his little penknife, and, holding it in one hand and pinning Quentin’s wrist firmly with the other, he began to dig out the slivers of glass.

Down the stairs, there came the sound of wood splintering and the tuneless twang of six guitar strings breaking in unison.

“That was the Hummingbird, wasn’t it?” Lestat said.

“Sounded that way,” Quinn replied glumly.

“Just who is this brother, Tarquin?” Louis said. He kept the whole of his attention focused on Quentin’s arm and his knife, annoyed that he had been thrust into the role of outsider.

“Goblin,” Quinn said darkly.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You know, like in the book,” Lestat said. When Louis did not reply, he twisted his lips into a pout that might have had a sublime effect on someone who was not so used to it. “You said you read it, Louis.”

“I said I was _planning_ to read it. When I had time.”

“Well, I certainly hope I can do the tale justice,” Lestat said. “I would hate to leave out anything important. But a few years back, Tarquin was as shocked as I was to learn that he’d had a twin brother who died shortly after birth.”

“Yeah, like Elvis’ brother,” Quinn added helpfully.

“So it’s the ghost of your brother,” Louis said. “My word, I’ve never seen you get so worked up about a spirit before, Lestat.”

“It’s not a normal ghost,” Lestat said. “It’s a vampire ghost.”

“Not the ghost of a vampire,” Quinn added quickly. “That would be fucked up. It’s a ghost that is a vampire also.”

Quentin had been silent until now, but at those words he twitched in Louis’ grip. “It has a great hunger for familial blood. Indeed, I felt that in it too.”

“Stop squirming,” Louis said. “So, you are telling me you exorcised this spirit once? Why not do so again? It is my understanding that sometimes these things don’t take the first time.”

“We didn’t do it,” Quinn said. “Rowan Mayfair did.”

“Well, we did help,” Lestat added.

“What did Rowan Mayfair do?” Louis asked, flicking a piece of bloodstained glass onto the growing pile on the floor.

Upstairs, a bookcase toppled over with a dull crash.

“That’s just it,” Lestat said. “It was a once in a lifetime deal. We broke into the family crypt and we got the remains and we destroyed them. She said that would work.”

Louis’ lips tightened severely. “Rowan Mayfair said that desecrating a baby’s grave would work?”

Lestat exchange a look with Quinn. “It made a lot of sense at the time.”

“Yeah, I guess you kind of had to be there,” Quinn said.

Louis sighed. It was just as well that he hadn’t read the book, though he supposed that would not stop him from feeling guilty every time he saw its neglected cover staring back at him from the bedside table.

“Regardless,” he said, determined to reason through the problem. “Perhaps you did something to attract the presence’s attention. Can you tell me what happened right before it manifested.”

“Nothing!” Quinn said, far too quickly for Louis’ tastes. “Me and Quentin were just upstairs talking.”

“What were you talking about?”

“Stuff,” Quinn stammered. “It must not have been that important, because I don’t even remember what it was. Do you remember, Quentin?”

Quentin had been watching Louis work, watching dispassionately, without seeming to hear any of the conversation around him. When Quinn spoke, he did not look up, but he said, “Yes, I remember very well.”

Quinn winced.

“I had just finished tell you about how I begat a child upon my own sister,” Quentin went on. “And that child was your grandmother, Quinn, and in your veins is my black brackish blood. And I told you that it is on this account that you must bear a curse upon your name. And, had we but a few moments more, I would have told you that I am very sorry.”

No one spoke. Even the noises from upstairs had gone suddenly, profoundly quiet. Louis set down his knife on the arm of the chair; his eyes did not stir from Quentin’s calm profile.

“I didn’t know all of that, Quentin,” he said at last.

“It was not my intent to keep it from you, sir. I would have told you all in good time.”

“I didn’t know any of that,” Lestat said.

“As for you,” Quentin replied. “I assumed you had your sources.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Quinn said abruptly, his voice sounding ragged, with an edge to it, as if he had recently been shouting. “Whatever Quentin did back then doesn’t have anything to do with me. I don’t believe in curses. I don’t even want to believe in ghosts, but I kind of don’t have a choice seeing as one is tearing up my bedroom right now. So, how do you want to get rid of it this time, Lestat?”

“You can’t get rid of it, Quinn,” Quentin said. “It is the black letter, the Beast. It has taken the face of your brother because he was as damned as you, but it is not your brother in truth.”

Quinn started to get up. Lestat took his hand and pulled him back down, saying, “If there’s a curse, then there must be a way to break it, right?”

“No, Lestat,” Quentin said. “There is no way to break it. One is born with it, and one bears it until death.”

“How do you know? Did you ever try?”

“The very fact that you say that you want to break it proves that you do not understand it. The very fact that you wish it lifted proves that you deserve it upon your head.”

Lestat frowned. “I’m sorry, Quentin. I just can’t accept that.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Louis replied. He felt a fond smile coming to his lips, but he swallowed it before anyone noticed. “We’ll think of a way.”

All at once, Quinn bolted to his feet. Lestat reached for him, but he slipped away, out of reach. “You all do whatever you want. You can call me when you’ve got your next great idea, Lestat.”

“Wait, Tarquin…” Lestat half-rose. Quinn backed away from him. “Where are you going?”

“Where do you think? I’m getting a motel for the day. As far away from here as I can.”

“It will find you there, Quinn,” Quentin said. “If it seeks you, it will find you, no matter where you are.”

“That’s enough,” Lestat said. “Quentin, if you have anything else like that you want to say, you can just keep it to yourself.”

“Don’t bother,” Quinn said. He turned on his bootheels and left.

Lestat’s brows drew together. He wavered a moment, as if he were trying to work up the strength to go after him, but in the end he sank back to the sofa with a sigh. “I don’t know what I did wrong, Louis.”

“Nothing,” Louis replied. “Nothing at all.”

He stood up, and shifted so he was sitting beside Lestat on the sofa. A light touch of his fingers brushed the hair from Lestat’s forehead, another straightened his crooked collar. Lestat closed his eyes, arching up against Louis’ hand.

Silently, Quentin rose, and rolled down his bloody sleeves. “I think I shall accompany Quinn this evening, if it’s all the same.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Louis asked.

“I think that it is needful.”

He turned to go, and he had almost reached the door when Lestat raised his head sharply. “Quentin, wait. Are you really related to him?”

“Yes, sir. I really am. Why do you ask?”

Lestat’s brow furrowed, and he thrust out his lower lip in thoughtful sulk. “Just wondering.”

“Good night,” Quentin said. And he was gone.

Once they were alone, Louis took Lestat’s shoulders in his hands and guided him down so that his head was resting in his lap. As he stroked Lestat’s hair he said, “I suppose it was too much to hope for that the peace and quiet would last. All the same, I would have liked more than two nights of it.”

“You can’t lay all the blame for this one on me.”

“For once,” Louis agreed. His hand moved lower, and he traced the curve of Lestat’s jaw with the backs of his fingers. “Will Quinn be all right?”

“He’ll be fine. He’s tough. But it’s not like you to ask.”

“As if I would stoop to petty jealousy over your boy, Lestat.”

“I know.” Lestat reached up and caught hold of Louis’ hand, pulling it around to his lips for a kiss. Louis submitted to it, but as soon as Lestat had loosened his grip, he pulled away.

Lestat did not press the issue. The notion that a poltergeist voyeur might be watching them even now had fairly well killed the mood.

“What about Quentin?”

“Quentin is tenacious,” Louis said. “ I suppose that is the most flattering thing that can be said of him. His story is all true, before you ask. I knew when I made him, and it did not stop me. It is a dreadful thing to have done…”

“You mean what he did?” Lestat asked. “Or what you did?”

When Louis didn’t answer, Lestat sat up again. Gently, he cupped Louis’ face between his hands, tilting it up and turning him so that they were facing. “Why did you do it?”

For a long moment, Louis said nothing. Then he laughed. “I asked you something very similar about Quinn, didn’t I? I can see now what an unfair question that was. But, if you really must know, I liked his stubbornness. He was so old, though at the time he was of course not even twenty. But he seemed old, unchanging. When you’ve been around Armand for as long as I had, you develop a great respect for tradition.”

“You can just say you wanted someone around who understood you,” Lestat said. “It’s no shame being lonely.”

“No, no, it’s not that.” Though Lestat still held him so he couldn’t turn away, Louis lowered his eyes. “I did not want him with me. I didn’t want anyone. I only wanted to leave him there, just as alone as I, but he would be a monument to all that had gone. Like one of the statues that stand as tributes to the Confederate dead.”

“I don’t understand,” Lestat admitted.

“Don’t you? Perhaps you can’t. You weren’t born here, Lestat. You only lived here a while, temporarily, but the South was never really your home.”

“It was when I was here with you.”

“Please, none of that. I’m trying to explain it to you. But even if I can’t make you understand, will you promise me one thing?”

“Sure, darling,” Lestat said. “Anything.”

“No books this time. Keep this one amongst us.”

“You still need your privacy, I guess.”

“I would prefer it,” Louis said. “But I’m not asking for me. I want you to do it for Quentin’s sake.”


	12. Chapter 12

Before midnight the following evening, they were on the highway out of New Orleans. Lestat was at the wheel of Louis’s rental car; Quinn and Quentin were sitting as close as conspirators in the back seat. Louis was on the passenger side, playing the part of the competent navigator.

It had been his idea to venture out like this, and as they passed the city limits sign, he swung wildly between an utter conviction that his plan would work, and a suspicious fear that he had led them out into the unfamiliar wilderness for nothing.

The idea had come to him earlier that night. He and Lestat had awakened to the sounds of the strings on Lestat’s Bosendorfer piano breaking violently, one after another, and Louis had sat up in bed and, before the first haze of sleep was even off of him, he had known that the answers they were looking for would not be found in this city.

He reached over to rouse Lestat, who had a pillow pulled over his head to block out the sounds of his Victorian music room shaking to pieces. When Louis touched his shoulder, he raised the corner of the pillow enough to look out.

“We have to leave here tonight,” Louis said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Lestat replied, muffled. “Tarquin may have had the right idea. We need to get a decent place, though. Not a motel.”

“I mean, we need to leave Nouvelle Orleans. I’ve just remembered something, Lestat.”

It was a dream that had made him think of it. A dream about Claudia, the sort that came less and less frequently these days, but which Louis knew that he would never really stop having. He didn’t tell Lestat about the dream, though. He only told him that he had been thinking of the last time he had been confronted with an impossible mystery, and he had fled all the way to the Carpathian Mountains to get to the heart of it.

“Yes,” Lestat said. “But there weren’t any answers for you there.”

“It was a start, though. And eventually, it led me to what I needed to know. If we want to solve this, we’ll have to go back to where it began.”

“Which is? What? Blackwood Farm? Tarquin and I have had about enough of that place, thank you.”

“No,” Louis said. “Further than that. Back to the source of this… what Quentin calls a curse.”

Lestat’s lips tightened. He came out from under the pillow and sat up in bed and looked Louis in the eye. In the brief silence that followed, the picture window in the music room shattered, and Lestat’s antique harpsichord clattered off a willow tree in the yard.

“All right!” Lestat cried. “Anything you say, Louis. I’ll try just about anything. You only have to name the place.”

“Only Quentin knows that for certain.”

***

They collected Quinn and Quentin from a Roadway Inn by the turnpike. Quinn had money enough for five stars, of course, but he probably assumed he was making a bold statement about authenticity, or at least thoroughly annoying Lestat.

As soon as they had parked the car, Quinn emerged from one of the identical red doors that formed a half circle around the lot. He stooped as he came out through the low doorframe, and he never quite straightened all the way up again. His clothes were rumpled, and his hair was tangled: wild on one side and flat against his skull on the other. He’d slept badly, Louis thought, and it showed, which was a rare thing to happen to their kind.

Quentin came out on his heels. In the seat beside Louis, Lestat shifted positions but said nothing. He didn’t have to, though, not to Louis. He didn’t like the idea that Quinn and Quentin had shared a room that day. Whether it was simple jealousy or something more, Louis could not discern.

Outside, Quinn bent forward so his face was in shadow and said a few words to Quentin, then they came forward across the parking lot. Quinn’s shoulders were slouched, his chin bent forward almost onto his breast. He had not shaved. Quentin moved lightly in his wake, treading upon the shadow Quinn cast in the glow of the headlights. He followed Quinn into the backseat.

“Quentin…” Louis said.

“There’s no need to explain. Quinn told me what you said on the phone. I do hope I can dissuade you from this course.”

“We don’t have a lot of other options at the moment,” Lestat said. “Tell us where we’re going.”

“I am afraid you will not find anything there, Lestat.”

“Then we aren’t out anything but the gas money.”

“I am also afraid you will find far, far too much.”

“I’ve already found out more than I wanted to about you,” Lestat said sharply. Quentin drew back, as if before the threat of violence, and Louis reached out to touch Lestat’s wrist, only to be abruptly shaken off. “Have you got something else you’re hiding from us, Quentin?”

Quinn’s eyes snapped up, and he seemed, for the first time since he had gotten into the car, to stir to life. “Leave him alone, Lestat. Like you don’t have a bunch of shitty embarrassing things in your past. Like we all don’t. I’m sorry about the house and everything. Maybe Quentin can just tell you two where to go, and then you can leave us both here.”

“No, Quinn,” Quentin said soothingly. “I will go with them. And I hope you will stay with me.”

Quinn crumpled back into himself. “Sure. Nothing like a roadtrip, right?”

With a cordial smile that didn’t reach his eyes, Quentin said to Lestat. “We must go into Mississippi. From there, I am sure I will begin to recall the way.”

***

After that, there was silence in the car, and too much darkness as they crossed the river and drove through a flat and moonless night. Occasionally, another car passed them, going the opposite direction, but these were infrequent.

Louis felt an intolerable crush of loneliness, even though he was far from being alone.

It was getting late by the time they made Jackson. Quinn had put in his headphones and closed his eyes, though he had not managed to convince any of them that he was actually asleep. He roused as they passed into the city lights.

“Pit stop, Lestat?”

Lestat nodded. “We all need to eat. Quentin, where do we go from here?”

“I shall remember in good time, sir. This I know.”

They stopped downtown. The city was sluggish in the middle of the week, and Louis suddenly missed the brilliant sleeplessness of New Orleans, or even San Francisco. Quinn slunk down an alley with Quentin close behind him; Lestat’s gaze snapped after then, and he called Quinn back.

“Why don’t you come with me?” he said with a bright smile. “Hasn’t it been a long time since we hunted together?”

“I’ll be faster without you,” Quinn said. “We don’t have to get all sentimental. We just have to get this over with.”

He turned and disappeared, and Quentin graced Lestat with a sympathetic look before following.

“That boy of yours has a sick compulsion, Louis,” Lestat said once they were gone.

“Pardon me?”

“No one would have even known that they were related if he hadn’t brought it up. He’s been after Tarquin since they met. Now I can understand why…”

“Maybe he just likes Tarquin,” Louis said.

“Yes, I can see that.”

“Maybe he just likes Tarquin more than he likes you.”

“That wasn’t what I was trying to say at all.”

“Obviously,” Louis said sharply. “Let’s just go, Lestat. Before you do say something that I wish you had not.”

***

When they got back from feeding, Quentin was waiting for them. Quinn was already in the car, his long legs folded into the back seat. His headphones were in and there was a look of intense concentration on his face, as if he could empty himself of everything but the music pouring in.

Lestat was irritated that he had been robbed of the minor superiority having to wait would have afforded him, but Louis did not pay him any mind.

“Did you remember anything, Quentin?”

“It has been a long time since I have been back in this place,” Quentin said. “How different the city seems. And yet, it is not different at all. I have visited just such a city in every state I have been too, and I found them increasingly common in Old Europe, too. Have you noticed, Louis?”

“Yes,” Louis said gently. “I noticed.”

“And to think, Louis. It has not been so very many years since Northern flames ravaged Mississippi, since this city was so many columns of ash. Chimneyville, it was called, because only the chimneys of the houses were left standing. When you think about it that way…”

“It’s remarkable that anyone could come back from that,” Louis finished for him.

Quentin smiled. “It’s remarkable that anyone would want to.”

He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a creased pamphlet. When he had laid it open on the hood of the car and smoothed it with his hand, Louis saw that it was a roadmap of the state.

“Here,” Quentin said, pointing to a place in the north, well off any of the main highways. “I know not how I forgot it before, but now I remember, as I always did. The place is here.”

Lestat came to peer over Louis’ shoulder at the map.

“There’s nothing there,” he said, frowning.

“There is,” Quentin said. “In that place, you will find a city called Jefferson, and in that city you will find the house of my father. And in that house, perhaps you will find the answers you seek.”

“There’s no city,” Lestat said again. “Look, there isn’t even a Jefferson listed on the key. I’m not about to wade out into the middle of hillbilly country for no good reason, Quentin.”

“It is a new map,” Quentin said, as if that explained all. “And it is a very, very old city. A map without a city is not the same as a city without a map. And if no one complains that a place has fallen out of the records, then it will never find its way back in.”

“Are you saying this town is abandoned?”

“I think that perhaps a thing or two still inhabits there, but it is not like it once was.”

Louis felt an uneasy chill. When he glanced into the car, he realized that Quinn was watching them very closely, leaning forward in his seat. His headphones were still in, but the little player was in his hand. He had stopped the music so he could hear better, but Louis did not know what he had made of the conversation.

“Let’s just try it, Lestat,” he said, because he knew that they were waiting for him to break the stalemate. “I don’t know what other options we have.”

“I see,” Lestat said.

He had, of course, taken it the wrong way, and Louis might have anticipated as much. But what Lestat had thought was merely a case of Louis and Quentin siding against him, was in fact Louis’ attempt to get them back on the road as soon as possible. He had the unshakable feeling that they were being pursued, and by something bigger and darker and crueler than Goblin at that.

Louis gave the map a glance. “It looks like it’s another three or four hours. Lestat, let’s drive a little more tonight. We’ll stop at the next big town for the day, and then make a fresh start of it in the evening.”

Immediately, he wished he hadn’t said anything. Lestat did not reply; he was clearly not in the mood for making plans.

“I’ll drive,” Louis pressed on. And without waiting for confirmation, he went around and got in behind the wheel of the car. It was as he was adjusting the seat that had been pushed back to make room for Lestat’s longer legs that he realized Quinn was watching him very closely.

Louis looked back at him. Quinn’s lips moved once, twice, as if he wanted to speak, but in the end he did not utter a single word.


	13. Chapter 13

It rained all the next day and into the night. By the time they set out for Jefferson in the early evening, the trees that lined the highway were sagging and sodden, and the pavement shone like glass where the light fell on it.

Louis drove them over the county line. Lestat seemed to have lost any desire to do so himself; he sat listlessly in the passenger seat, not even touching the radio dial. The station alternated between bursts of gospel music and long periods of static, and Louis did not dare to search for another, nor even turn it off, afraid of the silence that it was keeping back.

They had run all out of things to say. Even Lestat, philosopher and chronicler, had hardly spoken a word since the night before, when he had watched Quinn and Quentin slip off together and muttered, “I suppose that’s that.”

Louis felt that he was trapped in the middle of a conflict he did not understand, or that he was inadvertently trapping Lestat in the middle of one that he never could.

The rain hammered down mercilessly, beating out its rhythms on the roof of the car, sheeting off the windshield. It had been an hour since they’d seen another pair of headlights on the highway. Louis risked a glance in the rearview mirror, at Quinn, who was sitting with his headphones in and a distant look in his eyes, staring out the window as if he were watching something along the side of the road. His face was craggy with shadows; the divots under his cheekbones and the hollows under his eyes had deepened.

He reached out blindly and set his hand over Quentin’s, pinning it to the seat. The tip of one finger moved over Quentin’s skin in abstract designs, as if carving out a code.

Louis looked away again, focusing all his attention on the blurred windshield and the slick highway. Behind him, he heard Quentin stir in his seat.

“Louis, we are here…”

At first, he didn’t see it, but a moment later a green county road sign loomed out of the rain on the east side of the highway. He braked hard. The car slid, but righted itself. Louis turned off the highway, feeling a sharp dip as they descended onto the pitted and potholed rural route.

“Is this it?” Lestat said, with a measure of disgust in his voice that indicated he knew the futility of the question even as he asked it.

“This is it, Lestat,” Quentin said quietly. “We will go this way for a short while.”

He leaned back, as if the effort had exhausted him. Though Louis could not claim to know Quentin well, he knew him with the intimacy of a maker for his creation. He could see that Quentin was worried, and that he was going to great lengths to hide it, and it was then that Louis realized he had not once wondered what might really be waiting for them at that blank spot on the map. He’d been secure in the knowledge that Lestat was with him. Lestat, who could reconcile all.

Louis glanced over at him, thinking now, for the first time, that for all Lestat’s ingenuity and good intentions, there might not be much he could do this time. There might not be anything that could stop or turn or divert the course that Quentin had set for them.

Soon, the paved road gave way to tar and gravel, and then the gravel terminated in dirt. The dirt road arched slowly to the north, and soon Louis could hear, beneath the relentless pounding of the rain, the sound of running water. They came abreast of a river, and then the road turned and ran parallel to it. Quentin slid across the seat so he could see better, and each time the water came into view between the trees, his pulse leapt in his veins.

It got so loud that even Quinn roused himself from his thoughts. “Quentin…?”

“Shh, Quinn. It’s nothing. Keep going, Louis.”

Louis did, though he wondered how far back into the hills Quentin was going to take them. He didn’t like the idea of being caught out, far from civilization, by the rising of the sun. It seemed that quite some time had passed since they had left the city, but Louis’ couldn’t say for certain. His internal clock usually kept perfect time, but he didn’t know the hour at all, or even whether midnight had gone or was yet to come.

He glanced at the clock on the dashboard, but the digital displayed showed a blinking 88:88. Puzzled, Louis fished his phone out of his pocket, but the clock on it, too, had been replaced by a string of nonsensical characters.

“Lestat, have you seen this?” Louis said, handing the phone over to him.

Lestat’s expression did not change, but his eyes shifted from the phone to the dash, then back again. He reached into his pocket. Louis took his eyes off the road to look at the clock on Lestat’s phone, and it was at that moment that both front tires on the car burst.

The wheel wrenched out of Louis’ hands. As he fought to bring it back under control, the rear tires fragmented. The car lurched away from him, off the dirt track, and from directly behind him Louis heard a gasp of surprise, and then, close on its heels, another of pain, and at last the crunch of metal as the car came to rest against the trunk of a pine tree.

A steady stream of curses rumbled out of the back seat. Louis straightened up, feeling the bite of the seatbelt against his shoulder and a brief, sharp flare of pain at his temple. He touched the side of his head, smearing blood on his fingers.

The door on the passenger side hung limply open. Louis clawed his way free of the seatbelt and boosted himself over the center console and out. The rain sheeted over him, soaking him to the skin. Lestat was waiting for him outside; he took Louis’ arm and helped him to his feet.

“What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Louis said. “I think I ran over something…”

Lestat brushed Louis’ wet hair back from his face, bending to kiss the coagulation of blood at his temple. “Are you all right?”

“Fine. But Quinn…”

He turned to look, in time to see Quinn easing his way out of the back seat, one arm cradled against his body. He knocked it against the car door and made a strangled sound in his throat, all the color running out of his face.

“What the fuck, Louis?”

“Don’t blame him,” Lestat said. “How many times have I told you to wear your seatbelt?”

Quinn pressed his lips into a tight, pale line. “Where’s Quentin?”

“I’m here.” Quentin’s voice came from slightly above them, atop the incline they had slid down when they left the road. He reappeared then, in the aura of light from the headlamps. “Look at this.”

He held out a clenched fist, in which he held a coil of creeper vine. In the rain, the edges of the vine bobbed slightly, as if it were trying to move.

Louis stepped forward and took it from him. It felt smooth, cold to the touch. The thorns bit into his palm, drawing blood. When Louis held it up so he could see it better, he realized it was not a vine as he had first thought. It was a section of barbed wire.

“Where did you get this?”

“It’s lashed all across the road up there,” Quentin said.

Louis handed the wire off to Lestat, and followed Quentin up to the road. There were three lengths of barbed wire stretched across the dirt track, one with a section broken off where Quentin had twisted it free. Two sturdy pines on either side of the road anchored the wires, which coiled around the roots and then up the trunks, clinging to the bark not unlike the creeping vines Louis had at first taken them for.

“What is this?”

Quentin shrugged. “We’re very close now.”

Louis realized that Quinn was standing behind him. He still kept one arm tucked in close to his body, but the break was already healing. The rain had slicked his hair down into his eyes, and he slopped it back with a shake of his head.

“This is fucked up _Hills Have Eyes_ shit,” he said.

He prodded one of the broken ends of barbed wire with the toe of his cowboy boot, and the wire snapped back like a trap, coiling around his ankle. The metal thorns drove through the leather and into his skin.

Quinn yelped, stumbling back. The length of barbed wire broke off and he barely managed to catch himself before he fell. “What the hell is that?”

Quentin was at his side, steadying him by his uninjured arm. “Do not be afraid, Quinn. It can’t hurt you. We must go on. We’re almost there.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Lestat said. He had turned off the car and retrieved the keys, and joined them on the road just in time to see the barbed wire move. “It was Louis’ decision to come here, and he’ll decide if we’re turning back or not.”

Louis could have done without that responsibility, but there was no point arguing with Lestat now. His eyes moved from face to face, taking in the grim seriousness of Lestat’s expression, the haggard weariness of Quinn’s. Quentin was more difficult to read, but in the tilt of his lips, the narrowing of his eyes, Louis thought that he was, silently, begging him for something. He had no idea what it could be.

“We’ll keep going,” he said at last.

Lestat nodded. “I saw a house up ahead.”

“Does someone live out here?” Louis said. “There aren’t even any power lines…”

He caught Quentin’s eye then, just in time to see a look of shrewd amusement cross his face. Disturbed, Louis said nothing more.

A few yards up the road took a sharp turn to the north, and only a pair of wheel ruts continued on. The tracks were the narrow, crooked kind made by the wooden wheels of a heavy cart. They were deep enough that the rain had not been able to fill them in completely. Stepping wide around the tracks, mindful of dirtying his shoes, Louis went up past a dilapidated cotton house made of fitted logs with no chinking between them. The tin roof sagged with age, so that even the rain falling upon it did not make a noise.

Everything about the scene suggested abandonment and desolation, save for the fresh wagon tracks in the mud. Louis knew that he could not turn back, and so he shoved his hands into his pockets and twisted them into fists and walked on.

On the other side of the cotton house, he could see down the slope to a wooden shack tucked in between two hills, fitted like a plug of tobacco into a jaw. The pines grew in tight around it, with some young saplings coming up close enough that their branches scraped the tarpaper walls. The porch was crumpled in upon itself. The stairs leading up were all bent and splintered in the middle, and there was only a wooden box to climb up to the door through a broken section of the porch railing.

A candle burned steadily in one of the windows, but the greasepaper curtains were drawn and Louis could not see inside.

Lestat came up beside him. He was alone.

“Where’s Quinn?” Louis asked.

Lestat nodded back towards the cotton house, where the lit end of a cigarette winked from beneath the shelter of the eaves. “I wish he’d quit smoking those things.”

“It won’t hurt anything,” Louis said softly. He watched for a moment through the gray and dingy shadow of the rain. Quinn sat down on the raised floor of the cotton house with his legs hanging over the side. He bowed his shoulders, resting his elbows on his knees. Quentin’s smaller, darker presence moved in beside him.

Louis looked away. “We’re just going to ask directions.”

“Right,” Lestat said, though he did not move.

With a sigh, Louis started forward, but before he could take more than a step, Lestat grabbed his wrist. “Louis, wait. Did I ever tell you…?”

Louis looked back at him. The rain seemed an impenetrable veil, rendering Lestat’s face vague and indistinct to him, even at this close distance.

“Did I ever tell you, Tarquin is very sensitive to spirits.”

“Is that what he’s doing back there?” Louis said. “Ghost hunting?”

“Not exactly,” Lestat replied. “He doesn’t see them. Not usually, at least. But it’s as if they can move through him and within him. I’m saying this because, if he seems strange to you…”

Louis turned his hand so Lestat’s fell into it, and he laced their fingers together. “Yes, I understand. I won’t hold it against him.”

He went on, down toward the house that was in actuality little more than a shack. Though the rain cloaked their approach and neither of them made a sound as they drew near, the front door opened in anticipation before they had even mounted onto the porch. A wedge of orange firelight spilled out, giving the illusion of a portal that looked onto an inferno.

A dark shape shimmered in the doorway, thrown into sharp contrast by the brightness within. It was a man, lean to the point of emaciation, stooped to the point of crookedness; he came forward a step, out onto the porch, and leaned against the railing to peer down at them. He had a pinched mouth, a scar on his cheek, eyes that gleamed with frantic intelligence.

“You come at last,” he drawled.

Lestat drew himself up, pantomiming the self-consciousness of the once-almost-famous. “Do you know us? I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“Because we ain’t met.” He let out a bray of equine laughter, that choked itself abruptly into silence. He snapped a look to the left a moment before Louis heard the sounds of footfalls on the porch.

The boy who came around the corner of the house wore a broken-brimmed straw hat pulled down over his eyes. Rain sheeted off its drooping sides, pouring down to join the water that he already soaked clean through his clothes. His jeans and his soiled broadcloth shirt clung to his body, mapping lean and rangy cords of muscle. He was tall and gray-eyed, with sodden ropes of blond hair hanging loose around his collar. A big, strapping, mindless Adonis thrown down haphazard in the midst of the Mississippi hills. Utterly stupid and utterly gorgeous.

He eyed Louis with suspicion, then he looked at the man on the porch and the suspicion did not go away. “What do you want?”

“We’re looking for something,” Lestat said.

“It ain’t here.” It was the Adonis who was doing all the talking now, only when he spoke his eyes were on the other man, the one who might have been his older brother, as if he were a viper and every word spoken was a sudden movement.

“It’s a town,” Louis said. “A town that’s not on a map.”

This prompted another bout of laughter from the older brother, one which terminated in a fit of tubercular coughing. When he had gotten his breath back, he said, “There is a town. It’s right on up the road a piece. You’re lucky. Some folks have troubles aplenty with bad roads and bad weather, but I don’t think you are them. You should be able to make it without much fuss at all. Even with the rain as it is, even without your automobile.”

He said the last word very carefully, enunciating each syllable as if it were some unfamiliar foreign phrase.

The Adonis looked at them sullenly from beneath the brim of his straw hat. “What the hell you want to go up there for?”

Louis felt his expression tighten, for he had no answer to that. “We’re trying to help a friend.”

“It’s important,” Lestat added, as if to make up for the vague insufficiency of Louis’ response.

“Ain’t nothin…” the Adonis started to say, but then he stopped. The breath left him in a startled sigh, as if he had been struck.

“I’m surprised at you,” the older brother said. “Even we have people in town. People, and horses, too.”

“Goddamn you…” the younger said, and then lapsed into surly, wounded silence.

The older brother gave him a sly look, and then turned back to Louis. He leaned out further over the railing, and he scrutinized him carefully, at such length and with such thoroughness that he seemed to have forgotten Lestat was there entirely.

“Yes, you better get on up the road,” he said at last. “And don’t you mind the rain none. Rain never did hurt nobody, least not til the day it is all of it rendered unto blood.”

Louis opened his mouth to speak, but it was an utterly futile gesture. The words had all withered on his tongue. He felt the touch of Lestat’s hand on his elbow, drawing him back, out from beneath the brilliance of the older brother’s gaze.

“Okay,” Lestat said. He started to back up, dragging Louis along after him. “Thanks.”

“Ain’t no call for thanks.” He watched them go. Louis could see him standing at the porch railing, a thin dark shadow, slowly being swallowed up by the rain.

They came over the top of the hill and could see down onto the cotton house again. Quinn’s cigarette blinked out a steady message.

“Let’s not tell them about that,” Lestat said. “I don’t want to complicate matters unnecessarily.”

“Yes,” Louis agreed. His mouth felt heavy and numb. “Uncomplicated…”

“Unless, of course, you want to turn back.”

“No.”

“All right,” Lestat said. “I understand.”

As they drew near, Quinn flicked his cigarette away and stood up. Quentin stepped out of his shadow, and they stood there waiting, without talking or touching or even looking at each other. And Louis knew that he had interrupted them in the middle of something, and that, for the moment at least, they were furious with him for it.

“Come on,” Lestat said, not stopping to collect them, but continuing on in a rush back up to the road. It was only once he was there that he turned and looked back. The shack was out of sight, and the cotton house was vanishing into the rain.

He looked at Quinn with sympathy. “So that’s why you hate it so much down here.”


	14. Chapter 14

A few hundred yards up the road, they came to a pineboard bridge stretched across the river. The banks here constricted significantly, and the water that flowed beneath the bridge ran swift and choppy, the sort of rushing current that it was said vampires – or was it ghosts? – could never cross.

Lestat hesitated before stepping out onto the bridge. Travelling on foot was a great indignity and inconvenience to him, but Louis had the impression he wouldn’t have to suffer it for very long. Something would happen soon, that was what he felt. It would happen soon, or it would not happen at all.

Gently, Louis touched Lestat’s arm, urging him out on. The bridge lurched and swayed beneath their feet, the supports lifting and then resettling in their sockets, on the verge of being swept away entirely. Lestat’s hand was on the railing, and Louis saw him grip it so tightly that splinters of water-logged wood sprang up between his fingers.

He looked away, unwilling to think that Lestat might be afraid. So much of Louis’ resolve in coming this far had been dependent upon Lestat’s fearlessness, but he felt that he was now in the grips of a weary, dogged momentum that would not let him leave a thing unfinished. It had once dragged him across Europe and flung him up on the steps of the Theatre des Vampires, keeping him moving long after his curiosity and his courage had given out.

In the end, the bridge held. As Louis stepped off it and onto solid ground once more, the rain suddenly let up, just as if it had been hacked off, unfinished, by a sharp knife. The night was arid and very still, and it felt as if they had come out of a dark cellar into the dazzling light of an illuminated ballroom.

A waning sliver moon had been pasted in the sky. When Louis tried to remember what the phase the night before had been, he found he could not remember any more than he had been able to guess at the hour a few moments ago in the car.

Lestat stepped over closer to him, his wet clothes steaming. Louis kept his eyes straight ahead so he wouldn’t have to look at him when he said, “This place isn’t normal.”

“Thanks for the breaking news, Louis,” Quinn muttered. He had come across the bridge last, dragging his feet after them like a small, reluctant boy. But he was still here, Louis thought. He, too, had a stake in this.

“Do you feel something?” Lestat asked.

“I feel a graveyard,” Quinn said. “Like when you step into a cemetery at night, and all the spirits sit up a little straighter and make a note of you. Only it’s worse than a cemetery, because in a cemetery at least they know what they are.”

He’d said it quickly, getting it all out in one breath, and when he was done he sucked in a great, shuddering gulp of air. “I felt it all the way back at that sharecropper house.”

“Those were just some harmless, ignorant hicks,” Lestat said. “They weren’t ghosts.”

“They were something,” Quinn said. “Something that ought to not have been up and walking around.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Quentin savagely. “They can’t hurt you. They can’t do anything, none of them can. And we’re wasting time talking about it.”

He pushed forward, shoving between them. A perfume trail of honeysuckle followed in his wake, the scent of crushed petals, and Louis felt a cold touch move up his spine. The sick-sweet smell, the rushing of the water they had just crossed, Quentin’s nearness to him and his distance: all these things colluded now to give Louis the sensation of time doubling back on itself, of the present covering over and devouring the past.

Quentin put his head down, and clenched his fists at his sides, and marched steadily down the center of the moonlit dirt road. Louis went after him, but Quentin’s lean shape shivered, mirage-like, and did not draw any closer. He could hear Lestat saying his name, but his voice came from far away, receding more every moment. Soon it would be gone entirely…

He felt a bite of pain in his right ankle, drawing him up short. The illusion dispersed, and Louis found himself once again standing in the middle of a deserted country road. Quentin was a little ahead of him, but he had turned around and was looking back at Louis with his lips set in a twisted line of concern.

Louis started towards him, but a tug at his leg stopped him short. He winced, and knelt to extract himself from the tangle of barbed wire that was wound around his foot. It writhed in his hands, bending back to sting his fingers, until Louis yanked it out by the root and it fell still.

He saw it then: the vines of barbed wire stretched across the road, climbing the trunks of the sturdy old trees, nestled in the clumps of tall grass. It had covered over everything, like an invasive species, like a net that would one day retract and pull everything down into the swamp with it.

Reeling, Louis stumbled back. Lestat’s hand came down on his shoulder, steadying him. He pressed his lips up against Louis’ ear and said, too low to be overheard, “Let’s go back.”

“No…”

“Go, Louis,” Quentin said. “Go back if you must. But tonight I will sleep in the house of my father.”

He turned away again, but before he could take a step, Quinn’s voice called him back. “Quentin, please…”

Quentin hesitated, first tilting his head to the side as if he hadn’t heard right. Then, slowly, he walked back. Louis turned to follow him. In his haste to pursue Quentin from the bridge, he had forgotten about Quinn entirely, and he was surprised to see him now, wild-eyed and ashen, gripping a low slung branch on the side of the road, clinging fast as if he expected some sudden movement to come and throw him off.

“I can’t,” Quinn said softly. “I’m sorry, Quentin, but I can’t…”

“Hush, Quinn.” Quentin reached up, cupping Quinn’s face between his hands, tilting it down so he could see his eyes.

“It’s a dead place,” Quinn said.

“Shh. Don’t pay it any mind. Stay here, and don’t think about it.”

“You don’t have to…” Quinn started to say, but he trailed off, ashamed.

Quentin stood up a little taller, drawing Quinn down to him for a kiss. Lestat made a half-hearted noise of protest, and Louis only looked away. A moment later, he heard Quentin moving again, and when he went by, he trailed that alluring honeysuckle smell behind him.

Louis started after him, but a touch on his wrist stopped him. He turned, taking Lestat’s hand between both of his. “Go help Quinn.”

“Will you be all right on your own?”

“I don’t know,” Louis admitted. “But I’ll come back to you.”

Lestat pulled him close so that Louis was pressed up hard against his chest. Louis tipped his head back and submitted to a bruising kiss.

“I love you,” Lestat said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Louis’ cheeks flushed. Lestat thrust him away again, and before Louis had a chance to respond, he was retreating back to Quinn’s side. Louis did not watch him go; he turned and followed Quentin down the road.

“You’re coming after all,” Quentin said without looking at Louis as he came up beside him.

“You don’t have to do this, Quentin.”

“Alas, this fall was set in motion one hundred years ago. It is time now, Louis. Time for me to find the bottom of it.”

“Think about what you’re doing to Quinn…”

Quentin only shook his head and did not reply. Above them, the boughs of the pine trees whipped back and forth as if caught in a gale, but there was no wind that night. The air was hot and dry, and there were neither clouds nor stars in the un-revolving sky. Only the sound of the rustling leaves betrayed that an invisible storm raged all around them.

A pair of lights appeared in the undergrowth on the side of the road, set low to the ground and evenly spaced, like the headlamps of a car. They paced Quentin and Louis for a while, glinting off the lattice of barbed wire that crossed and strangled every surface, throwing strange shadows that did not seem to quite match up with the trees.

From out of the darkness came the sound of running footsteps. Louis was careful to keep his eyes downcast as they came closer, as they eventually passed so close to him that he could hear a woman’s panicked breathing. He saw nothing, not even tracks in the dust, and eventually the footsteps disappeared into the darkness behind him.

Soon after that, the lights in the trees flickered out, and Louis was left blinking in the sudden darkness.

“Quentin,” he said softly. “You don’t belong here. Not amongst the dead.”

“These are my people,” Quentin replied. “Forever and ever, this shall be called my home.”

Louis knew there was nothing more he could say, for all these things had been decided a century ago, in a city a thousand miles away, and all they had managed to do back then was delay them for a short while.

But at least he could be here, he thought. At least Quentin would not have to be alone.

A corona of lights had appeared on the horizon, the glow of an entire town lit up like a house that had left a light burning to welcome a late arrival. Quentin ducked his head and broke into a run, moving so lightly that his steps seemed scarcely to skim the ground.

Louis allowed himself to think about Lestat, waiting for him somewhere back there, where time flowed as it should and each moment left the past further and further behind. Then he picked up his pace, so that Quentin might not get too far ahead.


	15. Chapter 15

Everything was just as I remembered it.

Soon, we were back on the tartop road. The tar was freshly poured, not yet scummed by an accumulation of red dust, gleaming and smooth as a machine under the light of the moon. We passed through the long uninhabited stretch before the town limits proper, where the old railroad traversed. The tracks had not been used in some time, and the rails were rusted and the spikes were rusted and wooden ties were warped and rotted through. It mattered not, though, for when I put my ear to it I could hear the lonely cry of a train whistle and the clank of the wheels on the track.

How much better it is with the firmness of a road beneath ones feet. Rivers are too filthy for dying in; this was what I had learned since the last time. I had not been thinking of it back then, but the modern era is so full of preoccupations with dirt and disease.

Beside me, his steps locked into rhythm with my own, Louis was still talking. I could not make out a thing he was saying, for when a man returns to his home after so long an absence his preoccupations are many and his patience for words is short indeed.

Lo, before my eyes there loomed the outline of the old sawmill which lay hard upon the outskirts of town. My feet made quiet, solicitous noises on the tar road, and then, all at once, the hard sound of heels upon paving stones.

There was no city limits sign, there never had been. But there was no mistaking that we had arrived.

***

_Though I had known we would not find anything natural at the end of our journey, still I was not prepared._

_I could tell at a glance that the town of Jefferson had once been a place of some significance. Though I had come expecting some haphazard accumulation of shanties, sprung up opportunistically from the surrounding swamp, what I found was a good-sized settlement with a wide main street, trimmed on both sides by willow trees._

_Past the first ring of outlying houses, there was a town square, flanked on one side by a church in the Colonial stone style and on the other by a courthouse with a peaked tower. All was as it should have been, but the town was utterly deserted. I had known it as soon as I set foot on the paving stones: there was not a living creature for miles._

_Suddenly frantic, I attuned my senses to the night, but I could not hear a single voice or detect a single human presence. Even the sounds of the night birds and the rustle of the little nocturnal creatures in the undergrowth were absent from this place._

_Strangely, I felt no horror at all. All this seemed to me as if it were just as it ought to be. Later, later, I would look back on it and the memories of that empty town, poised like a predator with jaws open wide, would haunt my dreams. It would be a long time before I would sleep soundly again._

***

Faster and faster, on and on. I flew upon stone wings through the silent streets. Past the mill and the city hall. Past the cemetery and all the marble tombs within. All I passed glittered with a metallic sheen. All was looming and distorted, as if seen through a veil of tears.

I went through the center of town, and came out the other side. Somewhere, not far away, water was running: a tributary branch that ran along the outskirts of town. The branch was the sight of my great transgression, and I went towards it now. No matter how many years had gone by, no matter how swift the water had flowed over the spot, it would not wash away the stain of my sin.

This was the greatest of comforts to me.

***

_All around me, every surface pulsed and shivered. The barbed vines had climbed all the walls, coiled around all the streetlights, crowned all the fenceposts and the tombstones in the cemetery. A statue near the railway station was so arrayed with throbbing wires that I could make out nothing of it save a vague shape._

_My god, I thought, my god. And from then on I kept my eyes on Quentin’s back and did not dare look away._

_We passed close by the courthouse, and I felt an intense heat on my right cheek, as if the steps were consumed by a mighty blaze. But there was no fire, and the only light was the gentle and welcoming glow that issued from the first floor windows._

_I keep one simple rule when dealing with spirits, and that is to pretend that I don’t know they’re there. That time, though, I let my gaze stray towards the courthouse steps. That’s when the screaming started, and it froze my blood to ice. They came on, scything down the night, great breathless sobbing cries that raced up and down the audible scale._

_“Quentin…” I heard myself say, though no longer knowing what I wanted from him. But he did not turn back, nor even seem to hear. I reached for his shoulder, and he leaped ahead, out of my reach._

_We had come at last to a high wrought iron gate. Here, too, the barbed wire had grown up and up, and it had pried open the gate and peeled it back like flesh from bone. Beyond it was a winding stone walk, and at the end of the walk a stately old plantation house, fallen into tired and embarrassed disgrace._

_“Behold,” Quentin murmured. “I see death’s lights.”_

_He went through the gate, and I was close upon his heels. The screaming from the courthouse dogged my steps, and I did not dare turn back. I heard it, though, when the gate creaked shut behind me._

***

I was thinking at that moment of him, and of the hotel off the Interstate where I am with him, and we both know, though neither of us have spoken it, that it is the last night we will be together.

“Don’t leave me,” he says, and he is all around me like a vine on a trellis. “Promise me you won’t.”

I promise it, and I mean it, though I know, even as I say the words, that in the end, he will be the one to abandon me.

***

_The screams from the courthouse steps had become very quiet, though they had not ceased entirely. I stood, rooted to the spot, on the splendid and crumbling walk that led up to the Compson house. In the moonlight, all was clear to me. The spiderweb cracks in the window panes, the sadly peeling paint, the decrepit columns, and the sagging unmoored balconies. Black veins of barbed wire had scaled all the walls. They stretched over the windows, the doors. The roof was encrusted with gleaming spikes. Across the front porch, wires were strung that were as thick around as sapling trees._

_Quentin ascended the steps, and the vines furled back and made a way for him to pass. When he stumbled on a broken stair, they uncoiled from the railing so that he could steady himself without being stung._

_I heard the courthouse clock sounding the hour, and I tried to count the chimes, as if I could pull myself, by force of will alone, back into time. But the ringing of the courthouse clock was mingled with other clocks, stumbling one over the next so that they came in a white and senseless blur of noise. It was deafening, but I lacked even the strength to raise my hands to cover my ears._

_Quentin was on the porch. The barbed wire stretched across the door retreated. His shoulders were back, and his head was up. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, and he did not turn to look behind. He was, to me, almost exactly like a picture of a saint._

_The oak door, sealed for so long now against the outside world, flung open for him. Beyond it lay a darkness like none I had ever seen before._

***

He was with me then, too.

Him going up under the roof of the cotton house to be out of the rain. I sit beside him, my hip touching his, for we are all out of time and I have neither patience nor subtlety nor inclination to tell ought from ought not.

I lay my head upon his crooked knees, and for a moment I think he will not do anything, but then I feel it: his fingers softly caressing the back of my neck. Oh, my body and my blood. Oh, my bones and my breath.

“You know how I feel,” he says, in a voice that he is trying to hold steady. The cigarette stops his hands from shaking, though the effect is nothing but a placebo, an arrangement he has made with his body. “You know, but it’s not enough to stop you.”

“If there were anything that could…”

“Don’t.” He says the word like he is spitting out a bad taste. “I can’t take anymore bullshit right now.”

He is quiet then, dragging furiously on the cigarette, which makes me long to taste his mouth, the ashes on his tongue. Louis and Lestat are far away, and even our thoughts are safe now.

“I can’t ever seem to get anywhere first,” Quinn says. “I thought Lestat loved me, but he was only killing time until Louis turned up again. I thought there would never be anything worse than that. But then you came, and you can’t even love me more than you love a dead girl. I’m not even good enough for that. I hate her, you know. I really hate her, even though she’s just as much in me as you are…”

***

_The chimes became a roar that threatened to consume all, to obliterate everything they sounded over, even me._

_Abruptly, they broke off, and the silence that followed was absolute. No echo called back, and even the screams from the steps of the courthouse had gone quiet, as if all the city’s sins had been washed clean. Quentin stepped forward, over the threshold and into the waiting darkness._

_The doors clapped shut behind him, and they did not open again._

***

Later, when Louis finally feels able to tell him what happened, he takes it as well as can be expected. He does not weep, or rage, or even withdraw. But slowly, only very slowly, Lestat begins to notice a change in him. How Quinn moves now as if in a dream, with the bright and feverish eyes of a subterranean creature dragged out for a moment into the full light of day and then thrust back beneath the earth forevermore.

His shoulders no longer straighten. They are bent, as if he bears a burden he cannot lay down. As if he carries with him the weight of all the past and all the future. All this he knows he must do in silence, for who but he could ever understand how it is to hate and to not hate, both at once.

But men still long for immortality, or else they would not be men at all.

~The End


End file.
